Some of you may laugh – but in investigating doing the astig on my Ampro I discovered that I had never understood the best way to optimize the electronic focus control.
Accessing the internally generated patterns:
- Press 1, [test] and use [step] to select the dot pattern
- Cut off all but one tube. (repeat for each colour)
Now by looking at the dots – you will see a huge difference when playing with the electronic focus. In the past I had used a crosshatch pattern to see the effect of focus – but this really hides the differences. Maybe I simply had not looked closely enough, but using the dot pattern makes it really obvious. I honestly in the past had thought that the electronic focus control on my Ampro had limited value – I was wrong. This also helped me dial in the mechanical focus a bit tighter too.
Now in terms of astig. I clearly have both beam centering and astig issues – not really bad, but enough that working on it is going to should have a noticible effect. I, like many, run my CRT with a 16:9 screen – this means that I need to vertically squeeze the image. This vertical squeeze has caused the default 4:3 setup of the CRT with round dots, to have squashed oval dots. Additionally it is clear that the beam centering is not perfect. More on this when I get to tweaking it.
In regards to the DVD player switch and moving from component to SVideo on the quadscan – it was a good change. I haven’t tried alternate component cables yet, but having done some searching around on the net it appears that at least some folks in the past had had issues with the quality of the component inputs.