The Display

Woohoo! I got the VFD display! This thing is huge... 6.5*1.75 inches of display area and weighs in at 256*64 dots.

VFD Display


That's a 40 pin chip below the display to lend some sense of scale... There's almost a pound of glass in that display. Needless to say, I'm very proud of it, and it will look killer on my player. No whimpy LCDs or small display area. As to exactly what a VFD is, this stands for Vacuum Flourescent Display. It is basically a vacuum tube that has a filiment (barely visible in the pic as lines across the display area), control grids, and finally plates which light up when struck by electrons. In this case, the plates are arranged in a 256*64 dot matrix, with 64 rows of plates and 256 columns of grids. The display lights up bright blue, and you probably have a couple of these on VCRs and microwaves around your house; albeit on a smaller scale.


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