The VFD drive circuitry in the Mk2 was improved over the Mk1 - in particular the filament heater driver. The Mk2 isn't any brighter than the best mk1's, but mk1's tended to vary enormously in brightness; we can't get any brighter than the mk2 is, we are running the display at optimum settings.

The difference between the empeg display and some other in-car VFDs is that we use a coloured filter. This does improve the contrast, but as it's coloured it obviously blocks some of the spectrum and reduces the brightness. Other head units with VFDs tend to have custom VFD glass with different colour areas (eg, red, yellow...) and just use a "neutral" (looks like smoked glass) filter to enhance the contrast, but not to block a significant amount of the spectrum.

At some point I might try to see if we can get a few neutral panels made for the empeg to see what it looks like. It'd be brighter, but the colour wouldn't match anyone's dash, really - it'd just be the natural blue-green colour of the VFD itself.

Hugo