I don’t mean BETTER. That’s a different conversation. I mean cooler.
An old CRT display was literally a small scale particle accelerator, firing angry electron beams at light speed towards the viewers, bent by an electromagnet that alternates at an ultra high frequency, stopped by a rounded rectangle of glowing phosphors.
If a CRT goes bad it can actually make people sick.
That’s just. Conceptually a lot COOLER than a modern LED panel, which really is just a bajillion very tiny lightbulbs.
Many receivers and amplifiers still have VFDs to this day. I still wonder why, LCD has to be significantly cheaper.
They look cool as hell though, so I appreciate that they go the extra step.
As someone who also likes VFDs, I’ve fully expected that they’d be extinct in new products by now thanks to cheap LCDs and OLED. But I find it awesome that they’re still hanging in there.