Sony Trinitron TV disappointment

[Kevin Dady <kevin@hackaday.com>]

So, for a while now I have had an orbital exercise do-whappy in my
living room, we both can use the workout and going to the park is not
always an option, a week or so ago we had our carpets cleaned which
gave me the chance to move some stuff around, mainly the orbital into
the spare bedroom, which is our "whatever" space.

The only catch was we wanted a TV in there, no problem I thought, I
will get one at a thrift store, and maybe if it doesnt suck I can use
it as a // monitor until I can get around to making a converter for my
NEC RGB monitor (which has been in the design notebook for over a
year)

OK then I hit the thrift stores, out of the 3 close by I found a pimp
9 inch color sony trinitron, its meant as a "space saver" design and
mounts on a pedestal which can be attached from the bottom or top
(like under cabinets), I looked at its picture at the store and it
was , I could see the compression artifacts from the DVD they had
playing on all the TV's. I hooked it up to the little comcast basic
cable digital box and its so good I can just about read the fine print
on TV commercials, which is impressive for a 9 inch SDTV and much
smaller than 80C text... looking good right?

Nope, plugged the apple into the composite input and the text is a
blur at 40C, featuring a large bloom around each letter. At that point
I needed to move on and have not fussed with it, but thinking it over,
why can I see mpeg compression artifacts and darn near per pixel
perfection over the crappy RF link, and get what seems like an
overblast on the composite from the apple?

Does the Apple (//C in my case) output its composite with 75 ohm to
ground in parallel? Do you think the composite in is fried? Like I
said I havent had much time to fool around with it, but the tube is
outstanding, why does it look like dried arse with an apple?