EEVblog #830 - Portable CRT TV Retro Teardown

Take a look inside a vintage 1984 B/W National CRT portable TV

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[PilotPlater]

I love the density of the design, it just all sticks together and holds its shape without the case.

[Seegalgalguntijak]

This beauty deserves a repair and to be preserved!

[thcoura]

Someone put love on this project. I'm surprised how well designed it is

[shadowxelnaga]

The vertical/horizontal ICs are actually vertically/horizontally positioned.

[shango]

I dont see one transistor in that, all ICs, where is the horizontal output transistor. I bet they made all those ICs specifically for that set. I bet its got a bad cap or shorted teardrop causing no deflection

[Lachlant]

I've used a similar portable TV made by Sanyo, it looked very similar to this one actually, but it also had a clock and an AM/FM radio in it.

[TheMightyFordFalcon]

I thought I was the only one that loved the smell of electronics!
Would love to see this little thing repaired.

[williefleete]

Idea for fundamentals Friday... How composite video/analogue TV is detected decoded onto a CRT (and PAL/NTSC colour burst) and audio separation etc. Someone else probably did it but might be interesting

[FFcossag]

I'm really impressed by the stated 1, 8 W power consumption. Given all the linear magic that goes into a CRT TV, that definitely came as a surprise to me. (Also, fix it.)

[lordskitch]

A buddy of mine had something similar when we were kids, probably about 4 times the case size, but the same size of screen. Undoubtedly powered off by 100 or so D cells. But! We could watch Saturday morning cartoons in a tree house.

[sirflimflam]

Wow, Dave. Back in the early 90s, I was digging through a friend's garage with him when my interest in tech was tearing it apart and we found and took one of those same units apart. It was really nostalgic seeing you open that up, bringing me back to my time around 10 years old.

[TheUbuntuGuy]

For reference Matsushita is pronounced mat-soo-shee-tah. They owned National and Panasonic before they rebranded a few years ago. Panasonic is great with old datasheets and manuals. I owned an electric typewriter and needed a section from the manual. After a quick email they sent a scan of the relevant pages over. I wish other companies were like that.

[MMSDK]

Here is one of those gadgets as a kid growing up in the 80's and 90's that I really wanted to own, but never did. This would have been quite expensive in its day by the looks of it. I'm not even a minute into the video though so I haven't seen the guts of it yet, so I might have to eat my words here.

[SeanBZA]

That Matsushita chipset was used in all Panasonic sets, you got a later set of variants for colour, using the same IF and a colour decoder. Was used in all the small portable sets, till they went and integrated everything from the tuner IF output to the output for the drivers onto one skinny 0.05 pitch 40 pin DIP package which did everything in one.

What is faulty is the vertical drive chip, or the associated capacitors on it. You can see the horizontal drive has a leaky coupling cap from the shifted trace.

[xDRTeK]

+1 for fixing it. I love old stuff, miss the CRTs too.

[ForViewingOnly]

Nice one Dave, and well done David2 on your win!

[snnyburnett]

Famously used by extra #27 on Miami Vice, sitting on the hotel porch across from south beach while Crockett drives by. Every episode.

[RaveTracks]

Oh yes, yes we do want a repair video, please!

[Nestortxai]

Thanks, Dave ! Love your videos ! In HD, you can see leaked capacitors near the vertical driver IC. There's also some visible corrosion damage to the traces caused by the leaked electrolyte. In case you plan a repair :-)

[bikejoede]

Awesome teardown! Thanks!
And congrats to David 2!