So I was surfing craigslist and found a big screen for dirt cheap. It's a 50" Zenith HDTV with rear projection, but the woman that was selling it said it need to be realigned. Basically, there's a sharpness issue and she said she believed the tubes were going out. I drove to her house and saw it. Didn't look very bad. Took it home and watched Transformers HD DVD on it. It looked ok - a 7 out of 10 - but the sharpness and colors were off somewhat. It did 1080i no problem.

For what I paid, I was like 'Hay, it comes on and I can see a picture," but I am really thinking of paying a HDTV expert down the street to look at it.

Has anyone else had to get their HDTV's colors realigned or adjusted? If so, what am I looking at spending?

If I can get cheap repair, dang, this TV would be the deal of the century.

Here's what my TV looks like - but it's all black instead ...

Thanks for any help ... 

How much did you pay for it?

Has it not got an auto convergence thing on it?

There's this digital feature that allows you to line up the reds/blues but I can only get it to align partially - it won't line up all the way. It's like a cross-hair of sorts - it can get aligned dead center - but the outer areas of the cross-hair are off a bit. Before I did the alignment via the TV, the reds were off big time - and the images were red and green. It's a lot better now, but I need to get this much sharper in case I end up reselling it. 

Man, just a benji. 

wow, for one franklin i would have jumped on it as well

And how much is that?

LOL - $100. So, I figured if I couldn't get it working, I knew I could sell it for that price.

However, after making some adjustments, the picture is ok - I mean, it could be a lot sharper, but I could resell it as is. I just wanted to see how much it would cost to get it working really good. I'll add some pictures later on.

The TV has 3 tubes - and this repairman she talked to said each tube was $150 each. I am not going to spend more than $200 trying to get this TV repaired. I have a dude I am in contact with that will sell me a pretty good HDTV for just $400 but hay, if I can get this working for cheaper - I am satisfied.

There *should* be a service menu which allows for alignment that is more precise. I had a Hitachi HD 42" rear projection and it had the same RGB crosshair alignment. It worked for the center 70% of the image, but the outer regions were still blurry.

There was a service menu which provided crosshairs in multiple areas -- I think it was 8 squares. Each had to be lined up. Once done, this improved the picture immensely. The trouble is, in that service menu, you can ruin the TV if you don't know what you are doing...

I'll poke around and see if I can find a service manual or "service menu" for that TV. What is the exact model as listed on the rear?

For a Benji, you can't go wrong. Even if you just use it for sports...