Curated headlines, original analysis.

The FOM Ladder: How Tube Specs Became Night-Vision Marketing

Our assessment: figure of merit is a useful floor and a poor ceiling. It captures two genuine drivers of low-light performance, but the market has turned a contract metric into a price ladder, and the ladder rewards inflation. Buyers who tender on FOM alone — or worse, on generation labels — are purchasing marketing. The forces that get value specify signal-to-noise, halo, and background illumination separately and test every lot. In a constrained tube market, the discipline of the tender document matters as much as the budget behind it.