Purplish colored bands on old CRT HDTV - how to fix it?

Factual Questions
1

A very frustrating issue has been bedeviling me lately. Maybe someone here can help.

I was given an old HDTV. It’s an old dinosaur of a TV; a Samsung DynaFlat, made in 2003, with a CRT display. I figured this was a good excuse to buy a PS3, which I’d been wanting for some time, so I did that. I connected the PS3 to the TV and have been playing Metal Gear Solid 4 on it. There’s only one small problem.

Two vertical, purplish-colored bands appear on the screen. They are most visible when something dark is in the background. Incidentally they do not appear on ALL black backgrounds - a pure-black screen, like the loading screens on some games, don’t show them. But they appear most of the time, and always during gameplay. In MGS4, where most environments seem to be tan-colored and saturated in bright light, they’re often only very faintly visible, but when Snake moves into a darker area, then they are more obvious. They can get kind of distracting.

To help you understand what it looks like, I created this image which is an approximate representation of what my TV looks like under this condition. You can see those purplish bands running vertically down the screen, to the left and right of Kyle Maclachlan’s head. The ones in the picture are more exaggerated than the ones that I actually have on the TV. Also, in real life, the edges are more blurry, kind of gradually fading off, instead of the solid lines in that image. But the overall effect, I think, should be visible to you.

I tried monkeying with the color, brightness and contrast settings of the TV but to no avail - nothing I adjusted got rid of those bands.

Here’s something interesting: the position of the bands actually CHANGES every time I turn on the TV. Sometimes there’s one all the way to the left and another one slightly in the middle; sometimes there’s one right down the middle of the screen, and a slightly thinner one all the way on the right side; sometimes the bands are different distance from each other. So they are not in the same place every time. They change when the TV is turned off and on.

What is causing this annoyance? What can I do to fix it? Worst case scenario is, I just buy a new TV, which is not the end of the world, but it would be nice to save the money because I would be content using this one for gaming, if this problem could just be resolved. Is there some way of getting rid of these purple bands?

2

Damn, what a fascinating oddity! I was guessing a degaussing or mask alignment issue until you pointed out the position changes when you cycle the power. Now I’m kind of baffled, though it is encouraging that the position changes, as it must mean that the big and unfixable CRT itself is fine.

Are the bands always uniform? That is, could you always recreate their appearance by getting some purple cellophane tape and putting two pieces on a good monitor? Are their edges ever blurry? Are they identical to each other, or is there any difference between the bands (width, shade)? Are they always perfectly vertical (within the possibly loose definition of vertical for a CRT)? Is there any pattern to the way they move, for example are they always symmetrical? Do they ever change when you don’t cycle the power? Do they change when you do cycle the power regardless of how long you wait during the off phase? Any possibility that it is your game system that has been creating the bands all along, and this monitor is the first one you have used that is nice enough to make them detectable?

3

The PS3 is brand new, straight out of the box, purchased two days ago.

The bands don’t change unless the power has been cycled. They’re always completely vertical; I mean, the screen is flat.

4

And the million dollar question…

Does it do this regardless of what you’re watching, or only when you’re using the PS3?

5

Haven’t tried doing anything else…I don’t watch TV. I can try it with another console plugged in. I’ll let you know.

6

Have you tried plugging the TV and PS3 into different outlets?

7

OK, I experimented with some things. Here’s what I have to report.

The purplish bands do not appear when I used the PS3 with the yellow standard video cable; they only appeared when I used it with the component cable (for HDTV). They appeared in both Component 1 and Component 2 views.

They do not appear when I use the Gamecube (which has standard AV cables.)

So it seems to be something that only appears on the Component view.

Furthermore, I found that the position of the bands actually changes every time I switch inputs (from AV to Component1 to Component2 or whatever.) Not just every time I turn the TV on or off.

When the PS3 isn’t on, but the TV is tuned to Component view, there is just a blank, bright green screen. The purple bands do not appear on this.

At this point I’m thinking it’s something wrong with either the component cable, or with the component setting on the TV itself. Unfortunately I don’t have any other device which uses a component cable to compare.

Any ideas?

8

Ladies and gentlemen, problem solved.

The PS3 was set to output to 480i! (And the whole time I thought I had been playing the game in “high definition!”) It still looked a whole hell of a lot better than it did with the standard AV cables.

But now I set the PS3 to output to 1080i. NOW, not only are the purple bands gone, but GODDAMN the game looks absolutely fucking amazing.

9

Do the patterns change when you wiggle the cables?

ETA: Nevermind. Woohoo, success!