Saved this CRT from the street. It had the power cable cut off, but thankfully, it does work again with a new cable :) It's a Philips 21PT5704/01
This is were I found it. I only remembered to take a picture when I already put the thing into my car. It was laying tube down on the fridge.
This was also my first time working on a CRT. Was kinda scary, but nothing happened in the end. Not even a spark when discharging. Guess these newer sets all have a resistor that drains the voltage built in (this TV is from November of 2002).
The power cable uses a connector, so I could just remove the cable and solder a new one to it. Soldering it directly to the board would have probably looked cleaner, but I guess this worked well too. I simply cut off one end of a normal power cable and soldered it to what was left of the existing one. I planned on using heatshrink tubes, but they already shrinked while soldering. I just ended up using electrical tape instead. Not the cleanest soldering work, but it does the job.
This is how it ended up looking inside the TV:
I wanted to be on the safe side when turning the CRT on for the first time, so I did it outside.
It did power on, and looks pretty damn good!
As it turns out, the tube was actually made in the UK. I think that's pretty cool, since everything has to be made as cheaply as possible today. The whole thing seems very well built in general, Rubycon capacitors everywhere.
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Of course I don't have the remote for it, so I didn't change any setting when taking these pictures. The black levels were still pretty bad, and geometry could be better as well. I ordered a remote to dial everything in, I hope it looks even better after that.
I had heard about people cutting the cords of CRTs left on the curb for free, back when they were more common, but I never understood the point. Surely turning an existing (though relatively power hungry) monitor into 100lb of eWaste is a massive net loss for sustainability?
Well, I guess there are some people that really think that the few grams of copper inside the cable is worth something. Most people see CRTs as worthless today anyway, which is pretty sad.