--- In NEONIXIE-L@..., "figureloop" <crobc@...> wrote:
Did you buy those from Sphere's? Their Russian stuff is overpriced. I made the mistake of buying some IV-22 (for $12/ea!) from Sphere. I thought they were something special until I discovered all the Russian stuff being liquidated on Ebay. I only buy stuff that is truly only available from Sphere's now.
No, I picked up a couple large batches on eBay and some others from a private seller I found. My average price for the thousand or so I got was 57 cents each.
That is a great price. Now I have a dillemma. The IV-9 has mediocre Russian quality, whereas the western made stuff is really quite precise. The Nocrotec clock, for instance, is truly beautiful.
But the price to get two sets of western tubes is 10x the price of the Russians'. Ugh!
I've had a dozen or so IV-9's running continually (including the decimal points) for 14 months now and there's no appreciable dimming and no segments have burned out.
I expect that the lifetimes of the Russian parts (including VFD's and the Nixies with mercury added) are vastly underestimated in the published data sheets. Someone on this list (or was it the smartsocket list?) did an accelerated-aging test on the IV-4 (datasheet lifetime: 1000 hours) and found no discernable difference in brightness. The IV-17 is the same part as the IV-4, but with a longer rated lifetime.
I hope that's the case for all Russian VFD's, as I have a bunch of the ¨¨??I_1/7's (I have no idea if the Cyrillic will make it into this message in one piece - I believe that's ILTSI-1/7 in English) which are 5.5" tall single-digit 7-segment VFD tubes. The datasheet says "To be determined" for useful service life.
