Tube Condition (Wear)

      >> Basic Information 
      >> What Uneven Tube Wear Looks Like On-Screen  
      >> Example of a Poorly Installed Set  
      >> Tube Wear Rating Chart  

Basic Information

Let’s look at some tube wear pictures. It’s completely normal for tubes to show some wear from as low as 500 to 4000 hours. Much like carbon build-up in a car engine, a bit of tube wear will not greatly affect the performance of the CRT projector. The below tube shows light even wear across the phosphor. This tube has been correctly used. There’s a minimum of virgin phosphor area on this tube, the wear is light and even, and setting up a new image within the wear area is easy to do. You will get 8500 hours + use out of this tube.

Now, let’s look at a tube that can still be useable, but is not in as good a shape as the above image.

This tube has a dark line worn into the extreme bottom of the tube. This isn’t really an issue, as you can shift the image into the less worn area of the tube with the raster shift function. The raster on the original installation of this tube is shifted slightly to the right of the tube face, but again, as long as you fit the image within the wear area, you can get an acceptable picture from this tube. The worst aspects of this tube is that the raster is not quite evenly worn from the top of the bottom of the tube. This will show itself as slight shading in the image, and an all white screen will show slight uneven tint over the screen area. The other thing to consider is that the tube shows light text wear. It looks like this tube projected static graphs or similar images for long periods of time. If this tube is the blue one, you’ll get slight yellowing of an all white field in these darker wear areas.  

Below is a picture of a tube that is nearing the end of it’s life. This tube has maybe 7000 hours of use on it, has uneven wear from top to bottom, and has some text type wear on the face of the tube as well. As the saying goes, “You might use this tube, I wouldn’t”.  :)

This tube is good for non-critical viewing or to get a set running that has even heavier wear or for video gaming use where some wear isn’t a big issue.

This last tube wear picture will produce a minimal image useable for home theater use. It shows that this tube might have been used in two previous installations. There is some large and light 4:3 wear area, but there is also a smaller and heavier wear area within this larger area, suggesting that the projector got moved at some point in time and a smaller phosphor area was used the second time around. To add to this uneven wear, there is some distinct text wear on the face of this tube. This will make for very uneven light projection from this tube.

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