The NEC MultiSync 6FG was the Cadillac of computer monitors when it came out in the early 1990s. Street price was around $2500-$3000, so if you had one you likely had a darn good reason. The video card needed to drive such a beast didn't come cheap, either.
I got a 486DX2/66 with a 17" monitor at an auction in 1995. For real cheap (about $500 iirc). I had no close look at that thing before I paid and picked it up. When I arrived at home I examined it closer and it had a diamond stealth VLB-graphics card in it (the card alone was well worth the 500 bucks) and the monitor was a top of the line Eizo. Lucky bastard I was. I used that monitor for about 15 years.
I remember years ago when I was a student at college, there was a monitor in one of the labs, I think an IBM that was a 19 inch and I believe I was told that it was around $3000 and the resolution wasn't even that high.
@@brownfranklin I worked in an advertisement-agency as an electrician in the 90s and they had about ten power macs 9600 there accompanied by 21" monitors. Those monitors were humongous beasts. They weighed at least 120 pounds. Each one of these rigs was high in the five-figure price range. It's really amazing that you can buy a capable video editing computer for less than $1000 nowadays...
When I switch my career from Engineering to SW tester, in 1995 the NEC monitor cost 2.5K. It is exact model 5FG. I paid $180.00 for rebuild and gor rid of it in 2017 and paid $50.00 to have it haul away.
Yes, I worked at Bell labs, and I remember back in ‘94 when we got these, we loved the monitor size and clarity, but we all hated that they took up the entire desk space. I was done with it by 1998 when i got a lcd flatscreen.
If any of them are still around, and you happened to feel like it sometime, I'd enjoy seeing you take a run at repairing one of the NEC monitors. I'm sure I'd learn something. I feel like I'm preaching to the choir when I say that most computer monitors will be more complex than a TV. Even a VGA only monitor has to deal with a few different scan rates and resolutions. At one time, NEC was very good about providing service literature and parts. They've probably long forgotten these monitors, though. The capacitors might well be bad. I had a much more pedestrian Multisync 3 from this same era that produced that tell-tale "fish" smell one day when I turned it on, and it stopped displaying a picture. Had I known at the time that it was likely still old enough to support TTL (MDA/CGA/EGA) input alongside VGA, I'd have kept it around and tried to repair it. I'm continually amazed at the morons who make a big deal of seeing the person making the video, like that was Important or rare or something.
I know a little bit about computer CRT monitors (I also use them or everything, even watching youtube). 1. VGA is RGB - the signal in the VGA connector and the 5 BNCs is exactly the same. The reason for using the 5 BNCs is to have higher signal quality (because VGA connector does not have the correct impedance). 2. Unlike a TV, a monitor can work with multiple horizontal/vertical frequencies. If you feed it the wrong resolution, newer monitors just display an error message. An older monitor can display rolling image because it cannot sync to the input frequency. An even older monitor can blow up the HOT. 3. Newer monitors have allowed horizontal/vertical frequency range (for example, 30-130kHz and 48-170Hz) and you can use any combination within those ranges. Some of the older, "multisync" monitors can have a "list" of supported H/V frequency combinations (or resolutions) and not be able to sync with anything else. 4. While the monitors can display interlaced signals, most PC monitors do not work at TV horizontal frequency (requiring at least 30kHz). 5. Usually, especially in newer monitors, the high voltage generation is separate from horizontal deflection (probably it would be really difficult to make the horizontal deflection + flyback combined circuit work at wide frequency range). By the way, it looks like electrotanya has the service manual for the NEC monitor.
@@ivok9846 The same way TVs do - by drawing every other line. The problem with computer monitors is that usually they cannot display standard definition interlaced video, because the horizontal frequency is too low (monitors usually need at least 30kHz so they can display 576p, but not 576i). However, higher resolution interlaced video is possible, for example 1080i.
@@ivok9846 Of course CRT monitors can display interlaced video without any problem. And there were interlace modes used in VGA specifications - for example 1024*768@43Hz (87i)
I had an RCA tv back in the mid 80's similar to the XL-100 you found but mine said "Lyceum tv" on the front panel next to the RCA logo. it had a very good picture and lasted a long time.
NEC MultiSync was the best you could buy in its day. Basically a late '90s CRT monitor made in the early '90s. High res, lots of refresh rates, all the bells and whistles. And that's not just any printer... that's a LaserJet 4, the very best printer ever made.
I think high resolution monitors were more conservative with the deflection angles than consumer TVs. A 90 degree tube is longer than the 110 degree CRTs seen in the final generations of consumer TV sets, making for a bigger form factor for the same screen face size.
I’ve seen the control rooms of large industrial plants like refineries and they had multiple high resolution CRT monitors arrayed around the control station, showing active graphic representations of the processes and flows of the plant. Maybe these monitors were their bad or spares pile, or collected and stowed in the shipping container when the process controls were upgraded.
That's exactly what I was about to comment, as my brother use to work for AirGas Chemical Company(Dry Ice) in the early 00's as their head maintenance tech, and they still had a few of these monitors in one of their control rooms on the day he took me for a tour.
I remember going to a power station and they had what must have been 30 off 21/22 inch monitors like this lined up outside ready to be disposed of, yellowing in the sun. Mitsubishi if I remember correctly. They all had BNC connectors on the back. They were huge, i've never seen monitors that big. I remember thinking it was a waste but each monitor must have had 10s of thousands of hours on if it was sat in a control room for 10 years. Oh well.
Mr. Shango. I am an electronics enthusiast. I learn a lot watching your channel. I especially enjoy your wit and sense of humor in this crazy clown world we all are having to endure.
Had one of those NECs on my desk back in the 90s. I was a cad jockey back in those days and it was the monitor to have. We ran an old DOS-based CAD software so everything was in basic 16 color mode. For pranks we would swap around the RGB BNC connectors on co-workers and drive them crazy wondering why they were drawing a red line but it came out green. That LJ4 is likewise the best printer HP ever made hands down. We had those all over the office as well. I miss those days…
2:00 Personally, I would take that LJ 4 printer. They are absolutely outstanding printers, very fast, parts are still available, can take Ethernet cards, a mac personality card, a post script card which makes it basically universally compatible. I have a laserjet 2100 and I can print to it from ANY computer. Amiga, OS2, MAC, Linux, Atari ST, SUN, every version of windows and even DOS. it doesn't matter. Postscript is pretty much universal. Plus, being networked, it sits in my basement and out of my way. The Laserjet 4 is almost as good as the 2100.
Years ago I got fed up with the junk these printer manufacturers were stuffing the big box stores with. Sell cheap, outrageous toner or ink refills and break down after a year. Bought a used LaserJet 4100 and years later, no problems. Replaced toner once. They were built like tanks. Last forever. Repair and maintenance parts readily available. Stuck in an Ethernet card to use as network printer.
Yeah. I cleaned someone's house two years ago and there was an old and slow TANK. I should have took it back home. Old HP Laser are built to last... and they use If I recall very little toner...
Oh man those monitors are worth BILLIONS if not TRILLIONS of fiat.. ..especially when they come from an e-waste container, weren't stored in a dry environment and when the CRT is tired from years of continuous use!! LOL
@@androgyne_sander Storage environment doesn't matter, only the current condition, and Shango said he thought the tubes still looked strong. I sold some boring Dells for $80, including one with a fairly worn tube. These NECs are apparently a highly regarded model so $300 each if they look clean isn't out of the question.
@@volvo09 yeah. almost all of the "home end" monitors had attached cables, and even some of the nicer high end ones did as well. Any time you see a CRT monitor like that with a detachable cable you know that it is pretty high end.
Hi my name is Dave I'm 65 years old I'm retired technician I still do old transistor radios and two radios for people on the internet I have over 500 old radios between transistor and tubes and I got a lot of TVs I like your videos I watch them all the time I have a lot of parts in stock like you I help a lot of people out I enjoy watching somebody in those what they're doing like myself keep up the work and may God bless you and keep you safe through the year thank you
That old LaserJet 4 printer would likely work forever with a good cleaning and a maintenance kit. HP printers of that era were tanks and HP knew it until they realized just how long they lasted. To sell more printers they began to build them like crap.
I worked for a long time in a lab repairing them. I had special equipment for this. It's not the same as TVs and you just can't replace diodes or transistors with compatible types. The adjustment was a profession in itself and I had to study a lot for that. In my country, Belgium, there were only a few technicians who could repair these and I saw this as my livelihood and specialized in this type of monitors.
I started my office career in the mid-1990s, after graduating university. I recall acres of cubicles containing beige monitors like these! 10-12" diagonal curved CRT screen set in a bulky cabinet!
Newer ones are a bit simpler, but still usually have multiple boards and lots of shielding. Also, deflection on some monitors is complicated, one of my monitors has a small circuit board on the yoke (it took me a while to notice that circuit board and actually it had the fault I was looking for).
I hope that you end up getting the schematics for one of these. I would really enjoy watching you fix one of those monitors! There may be other people refurbishing old computer equipment, but there's only one Shango! Also, that printer you found is quite valuable, those things are super work horse laser printers. HP Laserjet 4, from the days when things were built to last and repairable, before the wave of disposable garbage. Same printer i use at my shop ;)
I missed the LJ4, I love those, especially the VFD display. I used to service them at the office, we had a ton of them... I remember buying the maintenance kits from some discount place and you could rebuild one for like $30, with a new fuser and transfer rollers. I always wanted to come across one for myself, but I did grab a low page count LJ4100 with network card. They were my 2nd fav small HP laserjet.
Those NEC monitors were the bomb back when. Our office used them, to do AutoCAD drawjngs. They were on 24×7 for at least 8 years. Never saw one fail out of 1000s in use. They were replaced by flat screens before they failed. The bigness of them was due to the low deflection angle so that the screens would appear flat.
I used to have one of these beasts on my desk. They were leagues above your standard office supply crap. Picture quality and color correct display like no other. I was so impressed I saved up and bought the Eizo version for myself. It was crazy overkill for my home PC but it worked and worked and I only sold it because I got an LCD that was like half the price and had faster refresh. Nowadays you can buy this quality for about a grand, which is crazy to me.
That RCA is the era that I was a TV Repair engineer. The NEC multisync is of the era that I was repairing computer equipment (including those very monitors). Now working as a comms engineer while retraining to do virtual server stuff like VMWare and Azure. Because people don't like it real anymore.
Yeah those 6FGs were built for some insanely precise performance. Dual focus controls because the tube has horizontal and vertical focus grids to get a perfect spot. And that's just the static focus, they have dynamic focus too. Far more convergence and geometry stuff than any TV, and the shadow mask pitch was so fine the CRT had to be driven HARD so the video output amps are huge. Those Multisyncs usually have two or three tuned deflection circuits, one for each scan range, with relays to switch components in and out. To keep the picture size and focus stable, HV might have been generated independent of horizontal sweep. So lots of extra boards and adjustments. And if you think that's crazy? Take a look inside a Sony BVM sometime!
THanks Shango, Family had one of those Colortrack 100's with a 25" I believe in 1977 . We grew up without color TV so it was amazing. It lasted for years.
I recently sold three 19" Dell monitors for 80-100 each so one of those NEC monitors should easily be $150 cleaned up. A good bit more if they also support 15kHz modes.
I used an NEC very similar to that for 9 years. it was the best CRT ever. After 9 years of 12+ hour operation every day the tube was getting soft and it had some burn in. By the time I retired it, LCDs finally got good enough to replace it. I suspect the deflection angle is shallower because these run at 31KHz or higher horizontal rate. Those ones are definitely "Gamer's Choice" material.
These kinds of things are very high build quality. Where I worked we had Ayden monitors which were similar but only about 600 horizontal lines of resolution but big bucks. Years ago, memories are vague.
20:30 Those RCA sets had so much engineering in them for automatic tuning and tint control. Super energy efficient. As a kid I thought they looked like black and white sets from the back with the inline guns and no clover leaf convergence yoke and small deflection yoke. Good stuff.
I had a 17" NEC Multisync monitor years ago. Was a beast, with a great image. Still worked great when it went off to the Goodwill to make room for a flat panel. Was a great monitor, just too big.
That XL100 reminds me of the one my aunt bought to replace an entry level early '70's CTC39 tube console that the TV man said was no longer worth fixing. In reality, he probably just didn't want to work on it anymore. Anyway, those XL100's were good sets. The main problems they had was the filter cap opening, bad connections in the tuner, and the 3.58 MHz adjustment trimmer failing or needing adjustment.
I still use my CRT monitor from around 2001, it's really high resolution and it has a high refresh rate so they still really good Monitors in working condition.
I remember when I worked at a computer shop those NEC monitors used to cost about £1200, in 2000, normally graphic designers and architects used to buy them.
I was given one of these monitors or similar early 2000's in Europe and my 7 year old (at the time) started her computer journey using this for a few years...it was almost as big as her lol. Great picture if I remember correctly.
I remember repairing NEC monitors of almost the same model. The ones I worked on were non-RGB. NEC flatly refused to supply any schematics, therefore they were nightmares to work on. They were overbuilt and extremely complex monitors... :( 10/10
Those NEC multisync monitors are absolutely outstanding. I don't know if all of them have trinitrons, but all the ones I have ever worked with did. I have supported a LOT of computers and monitors.
Certainly looks like medical grade monitors, extra high quality CRTs and RGB inputs to give best colour imaging for surgical procedures. Used with Surgical operating equipment like Endoscopes and Ophalmic imaging systems, very expensive in their day and certainly top choice gear for retro gamers! I use to work on that type of equipment in a Hospital, I remember that there were lots of procedures to achieve a near perfect image from the camera processor unit and in the actual monitor, I remember frantic phone calls from the O.T. theatre when a video cable got broken in middle of an operation and blue signal was lost, the image looked pretty bad. Quick repair was simply to patch in a spare single BNC cable to carry the blue signal and the operation then proceded normally.
Dec 2021: In many more years to come this will only become more of a treasured time-capsule video for the bonus critique on present-day commercials. :)
My KDS Visual Sensations VS-195 had discrete RGBHV BNC connections and a disconnectsble VGA cable. Loved it but I used it for so many years I eventually wore it out. 1600x1200 all day, baby. ;)
A friend of mine gave me an AVID video editing system based off an old Apple Mac from the early 90s and that would have come with a pair of those NEC monitors when new, they really were the best of the best back then! Panasonic gear of the same age as those monitors suffered horrifically with dead electrolytics, so it wouldn't surprise me if NEC was the same, probably every one in the things will need replacing!
I Had a XV17 Multisync NEC in 1995 that had the BNC inputs. I was purchased new, with a Windows 95 NEC tower system. Expensive, and they had a great display for the time and well regarded by aficionado's of CRT monitors. Heavy, overbuilt, with manual Degaussing as well as Auto IIRC. Power supply seemed overbuilt at the time, but perhaps didn't age well. Maybe a surge took them out, or a brown out. Mine was still going in 2014 when I have it away. I thought that the screen had a diffusion or matte finish to eliminate glare and the aforementioned "I SEE YOU< I SEE YOU" immature idiots of the time period. Looking forward to seeing the RCA going again after being in that environment. EDIT: Where can I get some of that going on??!!! On the serious tip, that XL100 has a really decent picture considering where it came from and lived. Rack up another point for Team Shango. I want to see the NEC Monitors work. Don't you need special connector between the monitor cable and graphics card output? BNC I think was straight up but not VGA or SVGA. It's just a small connector that plugs in then the cable goes into that. ICR what the reason for that little piece of plug-in hardware was. It was probably there just to sell several million of whatever part it is and make some 24 year old engineer (in 1993) a millionaire before he was 25 from the Tech Bubble everyone was riding back then..
We had so many of these NEC 'Multisync' monitors in the office and control rooms in the 1990s, and some even still in the early 2000s, until the transition to LCD. The 21" monitors were HUGE and took A LOT of desk space. Seems only people using AutoCad got the largest monitors. The control rooms and the one I was using would be the 17" version.
Used to work on a ship surrounded by multiple large flat screen sony monitors. They weighed a ton and as the years progressed quality decreased and life expectancy dropped to the point where the HOT or the flyback would fail after a couple of years. Occasionally we'd pull them apart to figure out what happened but they were a throw away item to the company. One thing that worried us was the radiation surrounded by so many of these things for so long. I know they limited the voltage to limit the emission energy and the front screens were filled with lead but it was still something you wondered about. When they changed to LCD the colours were not as nice, but the convergence was perfect and they never magnetised up and it was a huge step forward.
NEC produces really nice monitors. I have a NEC MultiSync EA231WMi LCD IPS which is over 10 years old and currently have over 47k hours of run time. Never even opened it. The thing uses CCFL and last longer than two more modern LED displays which failed. This is insane reliability!
I have scrapped copper and aluminum for extra beer/gas $ for years and these things were always good pay-dirt scores. Mostly so complex because interactive graphics are extra-hard-working modules with all kinds of redundancies for "reliability" ~ridiculously, a wonder they would even last 10 years for their workload.
Which is humorous to me since my coworkers and I were so disappointed by the LJ4 when it came out, and we felt the LJ IIIs were more robust for abuse in the computer labs. In retrospect, I think the college mistakenly bought us the smaller LJ4s... the 4L or, more likely, the 4P... but to be honest, I can' remember... it was a tumultuous time of my life. Many times, I've considered picking up an old LJ... but without modern networking, I'm just happy to have my Brother units. Brother, IMHO, is the last printer company that makes a decent printer to stand the test of time.
Legend has it that HP LaserJet 4 still works. Anyway, The NEC Multisync FG series was THE MONITOR to have in the mid-90s. It was expensive....really expensive in the case of those 6FGs. They were used as CAD workstation monitors, once you add "workstation" to the marketing, you might as add a few $$$ to the price. I had a 4FGe (the 15in version) for years, bought it used in 1998 and ran it into the ground by 2006, it was 13 years old at that point. The slide on covers you saw were a static grounding anti-reflective monitor lens that NEC offered as an option. I found the service manual for the 6FG from the usual sources, but that unit is likely too far gone.
The RCA tv, the convergence is done by a social jig, I think they moved around magnetic fields around the neck until the convergence was perfect, then used high power to magnetize the sleeve in the same locations. The multi sync probably used a special crt that had two focus grids, maybe 3. All those caps are switched in and out to tune the flyback as needed for different resolution.
brings back memorys of 56k!! what a time it was in the 1990s good rock music on the radio, smoking was still common and lots of crbureted cars still on the road! now we live in a world full of soft zombies!
Those sets were pretty good. I used one of these in a shop for probably 10 or 12 years and one day it popped and the high voltage was gone along with the fly back..... LOL Cheers! 🍻 This one looks like it works well actually. They have good pictures on them.
The big NEC multisync 17" monitors were about $599 IIRC. I supported a building full of computers with these things. I know at least some of them had trinitron tubes because I once had a call from an end user who was complaining about the trinitron lines. At the time, I didn't not know what the heck they were. So I put in a call and had it replaced and the brand new one did the same thing. So I called NEC and found out that was normal and went and checked a bunch of other ones and they did the same exact thing. These are really good monitors and well worth fixing. They are pretty high resolution too. My memory is a bit foggy, but IIRC, they go up to like 1600. They should sync to most old computers, be it Mac, Windows, Dos and other formats.
congratulations on adopting a new son. Otezla looks like a swell chap. If he turns out to be a little slow, that's ok -- Uncle Joe will send him a generous monthly stipend, so he still has value even if the marketplace doesn't recognize it.
![ทุกครั้งที่หลับตา (Lucid Dream) - AYLA's [ Official MV ]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/4i1OBAQyv58/mqdefault.jpg)
The NEC MultiSync 6FG was the Cadillac of computer monitors when it came out in the early 1990s. Street price was around $2500-$3000, so if you had one you likely had a darn good reason. The video card needed to drive such a beast didn't come cheap, either.
I got a 486DX2/66 with a 17" monitor at an auction in 1995. For real cheap (about $500 iirc). I had no close look at that thing before I paid and picked it up. When I arrived at home I examined it closer and it had a diamond stealth VLB-graphics card in it (the card alone was well worth the 500 bucks) and the monitor was a top of the line Eizo.
Lucky bastard I was. I used that monitor for about 15 years.
I remember years ago when I was a student at college, there was a monitor in one of the labs, I think an IBM that was a 19 inch and I believe I was told that it was around $3000 and the resolution wasn't even that high.
i had a 17" multisync that i didnt retire until last year. they're great monitors for sure. great to see him workin on em.
@@brownfranklin I worked in an advertisement-agency as an electrician in the 90s and they had about ten power macs 9600 there accompanied by 21" monitors. Those monitors were humongous beasts. They weighed at least 120 pounds.
Each one of these rigs was high in the five-figure price range.
It's really amazing that you can buy a capable video editing computer for less than $1000 nowadays...
I got one 😎👌
Back in my IT days, we used these NEC monitors at the engineering company I worked for. IIRC, these monitors cost around $2,500 new.
We had them also at the engineering company I worked at to for the designers.
I paid that much for them back in the day
I got one new, back in the day.
When I switch my career from Engineering to SW tester, in 1995 the NEC monitor cost 2.5K. It is exact model 5FG. I paid $180.00 for rebuild and gor rid of it in 2017 and paid $50.00 to have it haul away.
Yes, I worked at Bell labs, and I remember back in ‘94 when we got these, we loved the monitor size and clarity, but we all hated that they took up the entire desk space. I was done with it by 1998 when i got a lcd flatscreen.
If any of them are still around, and you happened to feel like it sometime, I'd enjoy seeing you take a run at repairing one of the NEC monitors. I'm sure I'd learn something. I feel like I'm preaching to the choir when I say that most computer monitors will be more complex than a TV. Even a VGA only monitor has to deal with a few different scan rates and resolutions. At one time, NEC was very good about providing service literature and parts. They've probably long forgotten these monitors, though.
The capacitors might well be bad. I had a much more pedestrian Multisync 3 from this same era that produced that tell-tale "fish" smell one day when I turned it on, and it stopped displaying a picture. Had I known at the time that it was likely still old enough to support TTL (MDA/CGA/EGA) input alongside VGA, I'd have kept it around and tried to repair it.
I'm continually amazed at the morons who make a big deal of seeing the person making the video, like that was Important or rare or something.
Baby Otezla...this is why I keep coming back here.
I know a little bit about computer CRT monitors (I also use them or everything, even watching youtube).
1. VGA is RGB - the signal in the VGA connector and the 5 BNCs is exactly the same. The reason for using the 5 BNCs is to have higher signal quality (because VGA connector does not have the correct impedance).
2. Unlike a TV, a monitor can work with multiple horizontal/vertical frequencies. If you feed it the wrong resolution, newer monitors just display an error message. An older monitor can display rolling image because it cannot sync to the input frequency. An even older monitor can blow up the HOT.
3. Newer monitors have allowed horizontal/vertical frequency range (for example, 30-130kHz and 48-170Hz) and you can use any combination within those ranges. Some of the older, "multisync" monitors can have a "list" of supported H/V frequency combinations (or resolutions) and not be able to sync with anything else.
4. While the monitors can display interlaced signals, most PC monitors do not work at TV horizontal frequency (requiring at least 30kHz).
5. Usually, especially in newer monitors, the high voltage generation is separate from horizontal deflection (probably it would be really difficult to make the horizontal deflection + flyback combined circuit work at wide frequency range).
By the way, it looks like electrotanya has the service manual for the NEC monitor.
how do monitors display interlaced video? they can't...and you can't find a decent software deinterlacing in realtime and now it's too late....
@@ivok9846 The same way TVs do - by drawing every other line. The problem with computer monitors is that usually they cannot display standard definition interlaced video, because the horizontal frequency is too low (monitors usually need at least 30kHz so they can display 576p, but not 576i). However, higher resolution interlaced video is possible, for example 1080i.
Wow, great rundown.
@@ivok9846 Of course CRT monitors can display interlaced video without any problem. And there were interlace modes used in VGA specifications - for example 1024*768@43Hz (87i)
@@ivok9846 They certainly could. IBM's 8514 was an interlaced computer video standard (the 1024x768/43 Hz vertical refresh mode already mentioned).
I had an RCA tv back in the mid 80's similar to the XL-100 you found but mine said "Lyceum tv" on the front panel next to the RCA logo. it had a very good picture and lasted a long time.
NEC MultiSync was the best you could buy in its day. Basically a late '90s CRT monitor made in the early '90s. High res, lots of refresh rates, all the bells and whistles.
And that's not just any printer... that's a LaserJet 4, the very best printer ever made.
I think high resolution monitors were more conservative with the deflection angles than consumer TVs. A 90 degree tube is longer than the 110 degree CRTs seen in the final generations of consumer TV sets, making for a bigger form factor for the same screen face size.
I’ve seen the control rooms of large industrial plants like refineries and they had multiple high resolution CRT monitors arrayed around the control station, showing active graphic representations of the processes and flows of the plant. Maybe these monitors were their bad or spares pile, or collected and stowed in the shipping container when the process controls were upgraded.
That's exactly what I was about to comment, as my brother use to work for AirGas Chemical Company(Dry Ice) in the early 00's as their head maintenance tech, and they still had a few of these monitors in one of their control rooms on the day he took me for a tour.
Some people ran them 24/7/365 for years.
My grocery store is still on Windows XP.
I remember going to a power station and they had what must have been 30 off 21/22 inch monitors like this lined up outside ready to be disposed of, yellowing in the sun. Mitsubishi if I remember correctly. They all had BNC connectors on the back. They were huge, i've never seen monitors that big. I remember thinking it was a waste but each monitor must have had 10s of thousands of hours on if it was sat in a control room for 10 years. Oh well.
Mr. Shango. I am an electronics enthusiast. I learn a lot watching your channel. I especially enjoy your wit and sense of humor in this crazy clown world we all are having to endure.
@4:06 - "They're kind of both doing something, but they have issues..." You just described two of our daughters. :D
Had one of those NECs on my desk back in the 90s. I was a cad jockey back in those days and it was the monitor to have. We ran an old DOS-based CAD software so everything was in basic 16 color mode. For pranks we would swap around the RGB BNC connectors on co-workers and drive them crazy wondering why they were drawing a red line but it came out green. That LJ4 is likewise the best printer HP ever made hands down. We had those all over the office as well. I miss those days…
2:00 Personally, I would take that LJ 4 printer. They are absolutely outstanding printers, very fast, parts are still available, can take Ethernet cards, a mac personality card, a post script card which makes it basically universally compatible. I have a laserjet 2100 and I can print to it from ANY computer. Amiga, OS2, MAC, Linux, Atari ST, SUN, every version of windows and even DOS. it doesn't matter. Postscript is pretty much universal. Plus, being networked, it sits in my basement and out of my way. The Laserjet 4 is almost as good as the 2100.
PC LOAD LETTER
They used one of those where I used to work about 20 years ago. Was in use every hour of every working day. Pretty much never missed a beat!
Years ago I got fed up with the junk these printer manufacturers were stuffing the big box stores with. Sell cheap, outrageous toner or ink refills and break down after a year. Bought a used LaserJet 4100 and years later, no problems. Replaced toner once. They were built like tanks. Last forever. Repair and maintenance parts readily available. Stuck in an Ethernet card to use as network printer.
Yeah. I cleaned someone's house two years ago and there was an old and slow TANK. I should have took it back home. Old HP Laser are built to last... and they use If I recall very little toner...
Agreed. I wouldn’t be surprised in the least if that old LJ 4 fired right up without missing a beat. Those things were tanks.
I hope they didn’t end up in e-waste Because those monitors are extremely valuable and could’ve Fetched you some good money
Oh man those monitors are worth BILLIONS if not TRILLIONS of fiat..
..especially when they come from an e-waste container, weren't stored in a dry environment and when the CRT is tired from years of continuous use!! LOL
@@androgyne_sander Storage environment doesn't matter, only the current condition, and Shango said he thought the tubes still looked strong. I sold some boring Dells for $80, including one with a fairly worn tube. These NECs are apparently a highly regarded model so $300 each if they look clean isn't out of the question.
Those are nice monitors. Really like that they have detachable VGA cables, Most older CRT monitors have attached VGA cables.
That was always a sign of quality for me... If the cables came off, it was more of a professional monitor.
@@volvo09 yeah. almost all of the "home end" monitors had attached cables, and even some of the nicer high end ones did as well. Any time you see a CRT monitor like that with a detachable cable you know that it is pretty high end.
I rescued a Samsung SyncMaster 14" CRT from my university e-waste pile for that very reason. It's a great little monitor too!
Has a downside. You can (and will) lose the cable.
@@albinklein7680 any old computer collector has like 200 VGA cables laying around anyway...
Hi my name is Dave I'm 65 years old I'm retired technician I still do old transistor radios and two radios for people on the internet I have over 500 old radios between transistor and tubes and I got a lot of TVs I like your videos I watch them all the time I have a lot of parts in stock like you I help a lot of people out I enjoy watching somebody in those what they're doing like myself keep up the work and may God bless you and keep you safe through the year thank you
That old LaserJet 4 printer would likely work forever with a good cleaning and a maintenance kit. HP printers of that era were tanks and HP knew it until they realized just how long they lasted. To sell more printers they began to build them like crap.
That doll is really freakin' scary!
The HP LaserJet 4 is one of the most reliable laser printers ever! I have one!
Closing out the end of the year with a new-for-2022 sidekick! Nice doll.
I worked for a long time in a lab repairing them. I had special equipment for this. It's not the same as TVs and you just can't replace diodes or transistors with compatible types. The adjustment was a profession in itself and I had to study a lot for that. In my country, Belgium, there were only a few technicians who could repair these and I saw this as my livelihood and specialized in this type of monitors.
Man im envious, NEC made some fantastic monitors :D
I started my office career in the mid-1990s, after graduating university. I recall acres of cubicles containing beige monitors like these! 10-12" diagonal curved CRT screen set in a bulky cabinet!
I seem to recall that NEC made some decent products. Amazed at how complex that one monitor is.
Newer ones are a bit simpler, but still usually have multiple boards and lots of shielding. Also, deflection on some monitors is complicated, one of my monitors has a small circuit board on the yoke (it took me a while to notice that circuit board and actually it had the fault I was looking for).
19:15 . . . Talking about "severe diarrhea" while the bloke is swimming in the pool with that facial expression. Epic.
Perfect skin, or crippling suicidal depression and violent diarrhea. Modern world decisions.
Back in the day, the Multisyncs were the holy grail …
God thats one trooper of a RCA, what a diamond in the rough, be great to clean the old girl up.
I hope that you end up getting the schematics for one of these. I would really enjoy watching you fix one of those monitors! There may be other people refurbishing old computer equipment, but there's only one Shango! Also, that printer you found is quite valuable, those things are super work horse laser printers. HP Laserjet 4, from the days when things were built to last and repairable, before the wave of disposable garbage. Same printer i use at my shop ;)
I missed the LJ4, I love those, especially the VFD display.
I used to service them at the office, we had a ton of them... I remember buying the maintenance kits from some discount place and you could rebuild one for like $30, with a new fuser and transfer rollers.
I always wanted to come across one for myself, but I did grab a low page count LJ4100 with network card. They were my 2nd fav small HP laserjet.
To make Shango work on one of these NEC fg monitors is cruel and unusual punishment. Please think about it first.
I would love to watch you repair that old monitor, I'm genuinely interested in seeing it working
Gamer's Choice ULTIMATE EDITION
Those NEC monitors were the bomb back when. Our office used them, to do AutoCAD drawjngs. They were on 24×7 for at least 8 years. Never saw one fail out of 1000s in use. They were replaced by flat screens before they failed. The bigness of them was due to the low deflection angle so that the screens would appear flat.
I had one of the NEC multisyncs I got in '93 and ran non-stop until I upgraded to a flat screen around 2010. Work horse, for sure!
I used to have one of these beasts on my desk. They were leagues above your standard office supply crap. Picture quality and color correct display like no other. I was so impressed I saved up and bought the Eizo version for myself. It was crazy overkill for my home PC but it worked and worked and I only sold it because I got an LCD that was like half the price and had faster refresh. Nowadays you can buy this quality for about a grand, which is crazy to me.
nowadays you can buy that quality for a grand but you wont be able to buy that *build* quality not even if you buy the top notch lcd
That RCA is the era that I was a TV Repair engineer. The NEC multisync is of the era that I was repairing computer equipment (including those very monitors). Now working as a comms engineer while retraining to do virtual server stuff like VMWare and Azure. Because people don't like it real anymore.
Yeah those 6FGs were built for some insanely precise performance. Dual focus controls because the tube has horizontal and vertical focus grids to get a perfect spot. And that's just the static focus, they have dynamic focus too. Far more convergence and geometry stuff than any TV, and the shadow mask pitch was so fine the CRT had to be driven HARD so the video output amps are huge. Those Multisyncs usually have two or three tuned deflection circuits, one for each scan range, with relays to switch components in and out. To keep the picture size and focus stable, HV might have been generated independent of horizontal sweep. So lots of extra boards and adjustments.
And if you think that's crazy? Take a look inside a Sony BVM sometime!
Those computer monitors are so amazing, their ideal for any kind of gaming. If only we had LED picture tubes for monitors today.
THanks Shango, Family had one of those Colortrack 100's with a 25" I believe in 1977 . We grew up without color TV so it was amazing. It lasted for years.
That XL-100 was my childhood TV and that static-filled channel 6 is exactly how I remember watching it
Those NEC monitors are very sought after in the vintage PC community so could be worth a few bucks
I recently sold three 19" Dell monitors for 80-100 each so one of those NEC monitors should easily be $150 cleaned up. A good bit more if they also support 15kHz modes.
What a great RCA tv. These look like TV's used at schools but the best is your commentary in commercials 😂
I used an NEC very similar to that for 9 years. it was the best CRT ever. After 9 years of 12+ hour operation every day the tube was getting soft and it had some burn in. By the time I retired it, LCDs finally got good enough to replace it. I suspect the deflection angle is shallower because these run at 31KHz or higher horizontal rate. Those ones are definitely "Gamer's Choice" material.
I enjoy your commentary on the broadcasts you come across.
These kinds of things are very high build quality. Where I worked we had Ayden monitors which were similar but only about 600 horizontal lines of resolution but big bucks. Years ago, memories are vague.
I have an older dtv converter box that has vga output. The vga /rgb picture quality on those old monitors as a tv can be absolutely amazing.
They're pretty good for movies, I would say. Deep blacks, nice motion, and doubles as something to curl.
Wow... I'd take all of those monitors in a heartbeat!
20:30 Those RCA sets had so much engineering in them for automatic tuning and tint control. Super energy efficient. As a kid I thought they looked like black and white sets from the back with the inline guns and no clover leaf convergence yoke and small deflection yoke. Good stuff.
24:48 color lock. Probably 10 percent above noise floor and completely viewable. ATSC 1.0 need probably 45 percent and minimal multipath.
I had a 17" NEC Multisync monitor years ago. Was a beast, with a great image. Still worked great when it went off to the Goodwill to make room for a flat panel. Was a great monitor, just too big.
Those NEC Multisync monitors are well built. Overbuilt
That XL100 reminds me of the one my aunt bought to replace an entry level early '70's CTC39 tube console that the TV man said was no longer worth fixing. In reality, he probably just didn't want to work on it anymore. Anyway, those XL100's were good sets. The main problems they had was the filter cap opening, bad connections in the tuner, and the 3.58 MHz adjustment trimmer failing or needing adjustment.
The magnetic ring was bonded to the tube. It wasn't mea t to ever need adjustments.
I still use my CRT monitor from around 2001, it's really high resolution and it has a high refresh rate so they still really good Monitors in working condition.
I remember when I worked at a computer shop those NEC monitors used to cost about £1200, in 2000, normally graphic designers and architects used to buy them.
I owned a 5fge. 90 degree deflection. $600 refurbed in 1995. Great space heaters!
The first computer I bought in 1996 had a monitor just like the ones you showed. It was huge and heavy.
I was given one of these monitors or similar early 2000's in Europe and my 7 year old (at the time) started her computer journey using this for a few years...it was almost as big as her lol. Great picture if I remember correctly.
Looking at these monitors makes me feel like I am looking back into the stone age of PC computers.
I remember repairing NEC monitors of almost the same model. The ones I worked on were non-RGB. NEC flatly refused to supply any schematics, therefore they were nightmares to work on. They were overbuilt and extremely complex monitors... :( 10/10
I remember those 90s NEC monitors my dad use to have one in 93 to about 1995. The TV looks cool.
Yep, had a 6FG back in the day (I'm Senior CADD operator where i work) - it was sweeet.
Those NEC multisync monitors are absolutely outstanding. I don't know if all of them have trinitrons, but all the ones I have ever worked with did. I have supported a LOT of computers and monitors.
Certainly looks like medical grade monitors, extra high quality CRTs and RGB inputs to give best colour imaging for surgical procedures. Used with Surgical operating equipment like Endoscopes and Ophalmic imaging systems, very expensive in their day and certainly top choice gear for retro gamers! I use to work on that type of equipment in a Hospital, I remember that there were lots of procedures to achieve a near perfect image from the camera processor unit and in the actual monitor, I remember frantic phone calls from the O.T. theatre when a video cable got broken in middle of an operation and blue signal was lost, the image looked pretty bad. Quick repair was simply to patch in a spare single BNC cable to carry the blue signal and the operation then proceded normally.
Dec 2021: In many more years to come this will only become more of a treasured time-capsule video for the bonus critique on present-day commercials. :)
The big multisync monitors where good but very good monitors back in the day and still are good in my opinion.
What a cool RCA color tv
Those old monitors look like a box of quality components to me, the next time I see one going cheap I'm getting it.
My KDS Visual Sensations VS-195 had discrete RGBHV BNC connections and a disconnectsble VGA cable. Loved it but I used it for so many years I eventually wore it out. 1600x1200 all day, baby. ;)
A friend of mine gave me an AVID video editing system based off an old Apple Mac from the early 90s and that would have come with a pair of those NEC monitors when new, they really were the best of the best back then!
Panasonic gear of the same age as those monitors suffered horrifically with dead electrolytics, so it wouldn't surprise me if NEC was the same, probably every one in the things will need replacing!
NEC made some high quality, high $$ equipment for the computer market. Just looked like it wasn't syncing.
That computer monitor is worth a lot even in this condition retro pc lovers will absolutely love this thing.b
I thought I was the tops when I owned on of the NEC MultiSyncs. Something about the colorful bird logo got me.
I Had a XV17 Multisync NEC in 1995 that had the BNC inputs. I was purchased new, with a Windows 95 NEC tower system. Expensive, and they had a great display for the time and well regarded by aficionado's of CRT monitors. Heavy, overbuilt, with manual Degaussing as well as Auto IIRC. Power supply seemed overbuilt at the time, but perhaps didn't age well. Maybe a surge took them out, or a brown out. Mine was still going in 2014 when I have it away. I thought that the screen had a diffusion or matte finish to eliminate glare and the aforementioned "I SEE YOU< I SEE YOU" immature idiots of the time period.
Looking forward to seeing the RCA going again after being in that environment.
EDIT: Where can I get some of that going on??!!!
On the serious tip, that XL100 has a really decent picture considering where it came from and lived. Rack up another point for Team Shango. I want to see the NEC Monitors work. Don't you need special connector between the monitor cable and graphics card output? BNC I think was straight up but not VGA or SVGA. It's just a small connector that plugs in then the cable goes into that.
ICR what the reason for that little piece of plug-in hardware was. It was probably there just to sell several million of whatever part it is and make some 24 year old engineer (in 1993) a millionaire before he was 25 from the Tech Bubble everyone was riding back then..
We had so many of these NEC 'Multisync' monitors in the office and control rooms in the 1990s, and some even still in the early 2000s, until the transition to LCD. The 21" monitors were HUGE and took A LOT of desk space. Seems only people using AutoCad got the largest monitors. The control rooms and the one I was using would be the 17" version.
Very cool vintage monitor.
In order to get the required High Defination displays, those CRT's may have wider deflection angles (and be deeper).
My guess too but I don't think mine has all that high of resolution.
They are very reliable and good back in the time of the 90’s
Used to work on a ship surrounded by multiple large flat screen sony monitors. They weighed a ton and as the years progressed quality decreased and life expectancy dropped to the point where the HOT or the flyback would fail after a couple of years. Occasionally we'd pull them apart to figure out what happened but they were a throw away item to the company. One thing that worried us was the radiation surrounded by so many of these things for so long. I know they limited the voltage to limit the emission energy and the front screens were filled with lead but it was still something you wondered about. When they changed to LCD the colours were not as nice, but the convergence was perfect and they never magnetised up and it was a huge step forward.
NEC produces really nice monitors. I have a NEC MultiSync EA231WMi LCD IPS which is over 10 years old and currently have over 47k hours of run time. Never even opened it. The thing uses CCFL and last longer than two more modern LED displays which failed. This is insane reliability!
Just emailed across some schematics for the monitor, would love to see it repaired. Will be a challenge
Cool old RCA set
And new mascot too lol
I liked the RCA tv, nice set 😊
I have scrapped copper and aluminum for extra beer/gas $ for years and these things were always good pay-dirt scores. Mostly so complex because interactive graphics are extra-hard-working modules with all kinds of redundancies for "reliability" ~ridiculously, a wonder they would even last 10 years for their workload.
(02:30) The printer is an HP Laserjet 4. I am still using one of those. It is 25 years old and it is still going strong.
My HP crapped out fast. Took a 1 GHz program to run it on Windows 10. It was an XP printer.
Which is humorous to me since my coworkers and I were so disappointed by the LJ4 when it came out, and we felt the LJ IIIs were more robust for abuse in the computer labs. In retrospect, I think the college mistakenly bought us the smaller LJ4s... the 4L or, more likely, the 4P... but to be honest, I can' remember... it was a tumultuous time of my life.
Many times, I've considered picking up an old LJ... but without modern networking, I'm just happy to have my Brother units. Brother, IMHO, is the last printer company that makes a decent printer to stand the test of time.
If you just tossed those PC monitors you've screwed yourself royally. A couple hundred bucks a piece easily. Even the broken ones.
"best i can do is 10 dollars....for all of them " - Pawn stars
Those computer monitors were most likely used for CAD given the size and build quality.
Who else came for the oldschool nec goodness but about died laughing when shango turned into animal from the muppets about reflections?
Nice score on the RCA---it looks like with a good cleaning, it could be daily driver material
Legend has it that HP LaserJet 4 still works.
Anyway, The NEC Multisync FG series was THE MONITOR to have in the mid-90s. It was expensive....really expensive in the case of those 6FGs. They were used as CAD workstation monitors, once you add "workstation" to the marketing, you might as add a few $$$ to the price. I had a 4FGe (the 15in version) for years, bought it used in 1998 and ran it into the ground by 2006, it was 13 years old at that point. The slide on covers you saw were a static grounding anti-reflective monitor lens that NEC offered as an option. I found the service manual for the 6FG from the usual sources, but that unit is likely too far gone.
The RCA tv, the convergence is done by a social jig, I think they moved around magnetic fields around the neck until the convergence was perfect, then used high power to magnetize the sleeve in the same locations. The multi sync probably used a special crt that had two focus grids, maybe 3. All those caps are switched in and out to tune the flyback as needed for different resolution.
LGR and The 8 Bit Guy would enjoy those monitors. The reflection thing had me dying.
That TV set would be appropriate to watch the FIRST season of "The Simpsons"
brings back memorys of 56k!! what a time it was in the 1990s good rock music on the radio, smoking was still common and lots of crbureted cars still on the road! now we live in a world full of soft zombies!
Those sets were pretty good. I used one of these in a shop
for probably 10 or 12 years and one day it popped and the
high voltage was gone along with the fly back..... LOL Cheers! 🍻
This one looks like it works well actually. They have good
pictures on them.
You always find the coolest stuff.👍
Computer CRT's command high prices these days and not only for gaming, they've become quite rare and collectable for computer historians as well.
I've been on the lookout for a 3FG or one of its siblings for a while . . .
Shangoo66. What cool Monitors
I had this IBM monitor in 20 or 21 inch.
It was really heavy but ran at 1200X1600.
And had a really fine picture.
It had a vga and rgb connectors
The big NEC multisync 17" monitors were about $599 IIRC. I supported a building full of computers with these things. I know at least some of them had trinitron tubes because I once had a call from an end user who was complaining about the trinitron lines. At the time, I didn't not know what the heck they were. So I put in a call and had it replaced and the brand new one did the same thing. So I called NEC and found out that was normal and went and checked a bunch of other ones and they did the same exact thing.
These are really good monitors and well worth fixing. They are pretty high resolution too. My memory is a bit foggy, but IIRC, they go up to like 1600. They should sync to most old computers, be it Mac, Windows, Dos and other formats.
People into retro gaming are interested.
congratulations on adopting a new son. Otezla looks like a swell chap. If he turns out to be a little slow, that's ok -- Uncle Joe will send him a generous monthly stipend, so he still has value even if the marketplace doesn't recognize it.