Any way to make my older CRT TV work better?

[Scooter]

I have an older CRT TV I use for my gaming. It is a largish 32-incher, not quite a flat screen and I input everything but my Genesis with S-video which is the highest quality input it accepts.

When I first hooked up the S-video cables (PS2, Dreamcast, N64, Saturn) the pictures looked noticeably better than when using the standard composite video cables. At first I noticed the red bleed issues were almost all gone and of course the picture was sharper with better color definition.

Recently, however, I noticed that the red bleed issues are creeping back and that the picture clarity in the corners of the screen is noticeably more fuzzy than in the middle of the screen. In the center of the screen, the picture is really quite good given it is an older TV with only S-video as it's best input choice.

Is there any way to "clean up" the screen and restore the picture quality across the entire screen? The fuzzy quality at the corners concerns me and I assume it will get worse as time goes by unless there is something that can be done to clean it up.

Also, assuming I can clean up the picture, is there any advantage in using one of Racket's Dreamcast VGA boxes and using it to output S-video to my S-video TV?

[ZenLogikos]

I'm no tv repair man, but based on my knowledge, I'd say your electron gun is going bad. It can be replaced, but I'm not sure the cost and therefore how worthwhile that'll be.

[marurun]

You could maybe have a TV repair person come and degauss the TV and then you could play with the color/contrast/sharpness until you get an image you like. You might want to get (or burn) a DVD with a couple reference images on it so you can properly adjust the settings. Modern CRTs degrade rather quickly compared to those of 15 years ago, however, even as their picture quality has improved. The problem is that TV repair people are expensive.