I asked TNVC two questions over on ARF.
1. Wouldn’t manual gain be important with these?
2. Can we hand select specs with these new tubes?
Answer:
1. “Remember that all tubes will still have ABC - Automatic Brightness Control, so they will auto-regulate depend on ambient light conditions (the number of photons entering the tube), I've been using ABC SuperGains for about the last eight months in the TNV/BNVG Artemis, which is currently ABC-only and haven't had any issues in any lighting conditions beyond that of standard Unfilmed tubes.
That being said, manual gain control can be useful, especially to those who have very light sensitive eyes--long story short I would say that if you're already someone who needs / wants manual gain control, then you will still want it. If you are fine with ABC-only systems, I don't think that SuperGain will change that significantly.
Also, if you want to attenuate the brightness / input (technically not exactly the same thing as tube manual gain control from a technical standpoint) you can use refocusing devices like the Matbock Tarsier (probably the best option due to the iris allowing you to fine-tune the aperture size) to adjust the tube brightness on an ABC-only system while also giving you the depth of field benefits of a refocusing device, which manual gain control cannot do.
Doing my best to describe the experience of using them versus Unfilmed, the image is noticeably brighter, however, some of that is accounted for by the fact that the image is... "whiter," as most who have experienced White Phosphor know, the image isn't really actually white--it's more of a light teal, blue-green color.
SuperGain presents as leaning more "white," though it still has the characteristic WP hue, but to my eye, under most lighting conditions, it's also "cooler" temperature-wise, leaning more to white-blue than to green, if that makes sense.”
2. Hand-Select IS available for TNV-systems ONLY in SuperGain, within reasonable limits, of course, and as always, you can still hand select for cosmetics, though again, hand-select requests will affect lead times.