Do some searching here. Over the last year, I (and others) have posted various pictures comparing the Ablaze single LED (the 39c ones) to others including CoinTaker and PinballBulbs and Comet. The Ablaze were good -- for their time -- but now you can get much better singles from Comet for less money (26 cents each in quantity). The only advantage with the Ablaze is that you can truely mix and match your order for 100 to reach their 29c price, you can get odd numbers of each color, so long as the base type stays the same and the system will give you the qty discount. At comet, you must either buy 100 of 1 color, or a 300 lot of 25 of each color in order to achieve the lowest 26 cent per bulb price.
That's the ONLY benefit to going with the Ablaze over Comet for the cheapest bulbs, unless of course you need just 1 or two and are already ordering from PBL anyway.
The main negatives about the Ablaze from my comparisons:
- The warm whites are significantly pink-ish, vs the more natural yellowish of ALL other warm whites (unless they have since fixed this issue, but saw it over all of them I ordered in 2013)
- They are only half rectified, meaning they exhibit a tiny pulsing when used in a GI circuit under AC power. The Comets and most other brands have full rectification and therefore appear stable when used on GI
Don't ever consider using them for GI, for that get the frosted dome top 2 mini SMDs from CoinTaker or the frosted dome top single SMD from PinBallBulbs (or the equivalent from Comet) -- they have much better side throw. The cheap ablaze are mainly only useful for lighting inserts from underneath.
Here are links to previous comparision threads/posts:
https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/picture-comparison-comet-vs-ablaze-single-frosted-leds-plus-pbbct-in-white
(Notice how the Ablaze have a much smaller throw than the Comets and the hugely pink warmwhites vs yellowish tint warm whites from comet)
And and older one, no comparison to Comet just CoinTaker:
https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/new-warm-white-leds-from-ablazepinballlife-pbl-wcomparison-pics
I have posted others but this should get you started.
