Normally, Noritake will provide you with a dot matrix VFD sample to play with,
but only if you live in US or Canada:

http://www.noritake-elec.com/evalkit-sample.php

That's really quite nice, so ppl should be aware of that.

Suspecting that POV will work great with VFD, I promised a great demo including
their logo, in return for them sending me some 2x16 character modules.
They have replied with a suggestion display which is a HD44780, so it looks good

I don't think I'm finished with them.
I think it's possible to do greyscale graphics on a monochrome dot matrix VFD.