The brighter the screen is, the more likely it is to show up (it's always going to show up on mostly white screens initially). My immediate thought was that maybe all the capacitors need to be replaced, but according to the service manual that's 104 caps across all the boards. I'd like to get some other opinions first, because I would be supremely pissed if I spent the time to replace all the caps and the issue is something else that is still not fixed
.History:
I got this TV at Goodwill 3 or 4 years ago and had no issues with it when testing for a while. Didn't have room for in the apartment, so kept it in a closet until I got a house about 2 and a half years ago. Got it all set up in my game room and still had no issues with it. Admittedly, it rarely got used as generally things would get played on the HDTV via the XRGB3 instead.
Now the jittery picture started sometime last year, but I'm not entirely sure when due to the infrequent use and multiple changes. I got an Omega MVS (consolized Neo Geo MVS) around the middle of last year and I know the TV was still fine then because I had a friend over and we played Neo Geo games on it for hours that day with no issue that I recall.
Change #1: When we were playing MVS games, I noticed that quite a bit of the edges were be cutting off in the overscan. A few days or weeks later I went into the TV's service menu to adjust the picture to show nearly all the overscan area. Everything still appeared fine in my probably 5min of testing, then the TV continued to go unused.
Change #2: I don't recall precisely when, but somewhere about halfway to 3/4 through last year, I modded the TV for RGB input using information from the TV RGB mod thread on these forums. By that point, someone else in the thread with the same model TV had already done it and information was becoming plentiful so I wasn't having to guess what components I needed to get the picture in spec. Now the vast majority of my testing during this was by displaying the Sega CD bios screen, which mostly consists of dark colors. The jittery picture does not show up on this screen today, so if the issue started around the time of the modding then it would've been much harder for me to know. However, after it was done I tested all the different systems in RGB hooked to it and don't recall seeing any issues. even took some nice pictures of it: http://imgur.com/a/gfjBy
Change #3: Probably not too many weeks after the RGB mod, I got an Extron Crosspoint AV switchbox. I found out due to it's digital sync processing that it absolutely requires csync, so I went about converting/modding my consoles that weren't already csync. The first time I recall seeing the jittery interference was when I csync modded my PS1. It'd start after a few minutes of a bright colorful game. Initially I thought the csync mod I read about was crap and out of spec, so I ended up just changing it to get csync by running composite video through a LM1881. Everything appeared fine in my 5min test, so I assumed the original csync mod was the culprit and moved on.
After my setup was all complete and back together, the TV probably didn't get used for a few more weeks. Then when I started to play I was noticing the jitter on brighter screens as shown in the youtube video above. Initially it seemed like it'd never go away. Now I'm not sure if it was coincidence or not, but I went back in the service menu to make it not show quite as much of the overscan. Afterwards, if you let it sit on mostly white screen for 5min it appeared to "warm up" enough to where the jitter would stop (it appears this was in October according to the video). At this point I was so tired of projects that I decided I'd just ride it out for a while before (assuming it will be fixed by) bothering to re-cap it.
Note: I hooked consoles directly to the TV to bypass the Extron to make sure it wasn't the issue, and had the same behavior when hooked directly to the TV. I also tried every input on the TV (well, except for RF) to verify it was happening on everything and not just the newly installed RGB inputs).
Present day: The TV continued to barely be used, then last night I decided I really wanted to play some shmups on it. Same jittery behavior on brighter/colorful screens when I turned it on, so I put it on a mostly white screen to let it "warm up". However, this time it took 20min or more for it to stop. I started playing games, but then after a while it'd start being mildly jittery for 5 or 10 sec, stop for 5 to 15min, then repeat. When I went to change games later, it was acting pretty bad on bright screens again. Had to let it warm up again for probably another 20min on a mostly white screen until the jitter stopped, let a game run on it for 30min or so while I did other things, went back to check on it and it was being jittery again.
Basically, it's to the point where it's not practically usable anymore and I need to do something to try to repair it. I do want some opinions before I begin ordering caps for the recap gauntlet, but I'd be greatly appreciative of informed opinions as opposed to blind speculation. Blind speculation: "Yeah, if I had take a wild guess I'd say it's probably the caps", informed opinion: "Well, usually when I've seen issues like this then it's generally the ______ component which can be caused when X, Y, or Z is happening/failing".
