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.

  • tal@lemmy.today
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    8 hours ago

    I like the look of vacuum-fluorescent displays (VFDs) – a high-contrast display with a black background, solid color areas. Enough brightness to cause some haloing spilling over into the blackness if you were looking at it. Led to a particular design style adapted to the technology, was very “high-tech” in maybe the 1980s.

    OLEDs have high contrast, and I suppose you could probably replicate the look, but I doubt that the style will come back.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_fluorescent_display

    EDIT: A few more car dashboards using similar style:

    https://s3.amazonaws.com/skillshare/uploads/session/tmp/50c99738

    https://www.pinterest.com/hudsandguis/retro-car-dashboards/

    And some concept cars with similar dash:

    https://www.hudsandguis.com/home/2022/retro-digital-dashboards

    Some other devices using VFDs:

    https://i.ytimg.com/vi/PkPSDOjhxwM/maxresdefault.jpg

    https://ae01.alicdn.com/kf/HTB1_TIdcGmWBuNkHFJHq6yatVXaZ/LINK1-VFD-Music-Audio-Spectrum-Indicator-Audio-VU-Meter-Amplifier-Board-Level-Precision-Clock-Adjustable-AGC.jpg

    • ggtdbz@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      5 minutes ago

      Newer, but I quite like the gentle amber LCD (not LED) displays of my car. At night it’s bright enough and sharp enough without being visually loud. I wish more of these displays were still being made, I’d love to use them in car-centric Arduino projects and data displays that would be consulted at night or that sort of thing.

      I always ask my friends “How the fuck do you live like this?” when I hop into a car and the music UI is a garish color searing itself into my retinas permanently.

      Thankfully, advertising companies have identified this marginal comfort I find in the warm interior lighting of my car and have proceeded to mount insultingly blinding screens all over the city.

      The city being the midrise urban sprawl north of Beirut. What do you mean regulations on brightness habibi? You think you live in Paris? Imagine this: half the street is unlit because the power is out, but the advertising company’s invasive bullshit budget™ has enough foreign cash to burn to keep generators running all night for these shitty ads. Gotta beam an extra few kilowatts of photons straight into this sleepy driver’s eyeballs while they operate a motor vehicle, on a highway that a lot of people cross by foot. There’s a special on fish at the fancy supermarket, how will I live without that knowledge?


      Thankfully, the “state” of Israel has identified that the civilian structures of Lebanon mildly inconvenienced me, and has proceeded to

    • Domi@lemmy.secnd.me
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      5 hours ago

      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.