VL Systems M-Play 202 Plus

VFD = Vacuum Flourescent Display. Or, Very Funky Display. You decide!

Just a tip to the manufacturers of this VFD unit: If you’re going to include dozens of different drivers on your installation CD, you might want to point out which one should be used in the manual.

Now that I have that off my freshly shaven chest, I have to say that installing this VFD wasn’t too painful. Jack in the USB cable, pass your power cable that goes from your mobo to power switch through the unit, and away you go.

Once installed, the screen is very bright and easy to read, and you can tweak the brightness level from the setup software. The remote is, to be quite frank, rather sucky – it’s a bulky ugly black brick that doesn’t shape up well when residing next to the slick Windows Media Center remote.

But what will have most users rather chuffed is the excellent software that ships with the display. It can be a little overwhelming at first, as there are literally hundreds of settings that can be cajoled and pushed into the shape you demand. Thankfully it’s very intuitively laid out, although it’s a little buggy. Often we’d right click on the task bar shortcut to bring up the menu, but it wouldn’t stick. And when we booted another Mac (Bill's only true love) up on the same network the host PC was running on the VFD said my Windows XP machine was actually running OS X. Quirky indeed. The Windows Media Player functionality was quite limited as well, not displaying the graphic equaliser when asked to. Even when asked really, really nicely.

The hardware in this unit can’t be faulted, with its crisp clean display and exceptionally user friendly USB cabling. However, it’s quite a pricey VFD and the software definitely needs some work.