Another Year..

And my Ampro continues to keep working just fine. Back in November I finally finished painting it black, and considering it was a quick job with a paintbrush – it turned out pretty nice. Up close in detail, you can tell it isn’t an ‘original’ finish – but from the seating position in the normal dim light (or no light) of my theater, it looks really sharp.

black_ampro

There still hasn’t been a re-occurrence of the “burning component” smell, or the accompanying loss of image – but I did have some major convergence woes lately (but those too have stabilized).

If I had to make some guesses – I suspect that my HVPS is getting a bit sicker (the CRT is coming up on 15 years old!) and this shows itself in some focus drift I get. The registration (convergence) board is probably also starting to get cranky – and I’ll take some of the blame for this as my Ampro probably runs a bit hotter than some as I did modify the fans, it is also ceiling mounted in a not terribly well ventilated space – so with lots of people in the room it does get warm in there.

There are now some pretty reasonable (but far from perfect) 1280×720 LCDs out there – I expect within a year or two I’ll be moving on. However, I still really love the image that the CRT puts out, and get a real kick out of the tinkering part of this hobby.