Summary

Considered by many to be the best of Sony's standard definition televisions, the FV310 series has been made famous by numerous Youtube videos and online posts. Hype notwithstanding, the KV-36FV310 is an excellent TV. While It uses the same tube and basic chassis design as Sony's other 36" flat Trinitrons, it also incorporates a number of features from their HD models. These include a built in subwoofer, two component video inputs, and an advanced voltage regulation system.

Manuals

• User Manual
• Service Manual

Media & Promo Materials

• Brochure
• Consumer Reports Rating

Notes

The most unique feature of the FV310 series is the "high voltage regulator". According to Sony's promotional material, this "pulls the electrons to the screen more intensely" and creates a 30% brightness improvement. That's not a very good description of what's going on. However, despite this choice of language from the marketing department, the FV310 does incorporate a very sophisticated voltage regulation system, similar to a PC monitor. Unlike most TVs, the FV310 doesn't drive the deflection yoke and flyback transformer together. The flyback is on a different PCB from the deflection circuitry and is driven separately with a MOSFET, much like a switching power supply. Decoupling the deflection and high voltage allows the TV to maintain a stable picture size regardless of beam current. Unlike most TVs, the picture stays the same size no matter how bright it is, and there's no distortion in high contrast areas of the screen. The same process was also used in Sony's HD Trinitron models, many of which share the same flyback as the FV310.

If the back label is not visible, the KV-36FV310 can be distinguished from other models of Wega by the following features:

• Blue-gray front bezel.
• "Trinitron" in the top left corner.
• No memory stick slot.

The BA-5D chassis can easily be modded for RGB through the OSD mux method.

A common problem with Sony's flat CRTs is horizontal bowing, especially near the bottom edge of the screen. This is usually caused by poor yoke alignment, and can be corrected. For more information, see the "Adjusting a Flat CRT Yoke" page.