You arn't the Boss of me I do what I want image-176.jpg

Yes happy meal action figure toys are allowed as toppers etc.

That's BS.. im in the lighting industry and LED isn't the great gift from god they are sold as.. if the LED companies had their way there would be no other form of lighting and you would be left with no choice but LED.. its a ghastly light.. many of the pins shown look bloody awful with LED. But, we are simple creatures and like moths are attracted to pretty lights and if your pin looks different with LED then its better yes??.. well not quite.. it looks different to what it looked like before and seeing as you've been looking at it for say 10 - 20 years then you put it down to an improvement. MY guess is that everyone who LED'd their EM game suddenly had a 2nd or 3rd life for it and had to play the game again after neglecting it for however long. You've neglecting the game cos you got bored with it.. when the same feeling comes across after LED what you going to do?... Personally, I hate the damn fiddly things with their narrow band lighting. Ive got machines from 1936 up and my earliest games still have the same incandescent bulbs in them still going strong.. that's nearly 70 years those bulbs have lasted and no crazing on the backglasses... but then again, they weren't mass produced in China then were they.

let me guess.... the segment of the lighting industry you are in doesn't manufacture led's....

I got a C37 recently and it had clear double LEDs in the backbox. They looked terrible - there was a point of light where each LED was. So I set about my normal routine of pulling all of the LEDs out of a machine when I get it home. I opened the machine and for the heck of it replaced three of the LEDs with regular bulbs and three of them with single frosted warm white retro LEDs from Comet Pinball. I am not an LED guy by any stretch and had bought these LEDs at a show in 2013 because they looked really good and had never even opened them. To my surprise the LEDs looked really good in the machine. If anything they might be slightly less bright than a normal 44 and without a bright filament like a normal bulb it is actually better at dispersing the light behind the backglass. So I went ahead and did the entire backbox (minus the blinkers) since I had a pack of 25. To me it looks really good and is now putting out a lot less heat behind the brand new $300 backglass.

As for the playfield I don't want LEDs because of the strobing effect as the ball passes by. I did put Comet 6-fan LEDs in the pop bumpers because they look good with a nice even light and the pops don't illuminate the ball. I put a really bright LED under the red Special insert because the insert is so opaque and now it matches the normal inserts when lit. I left all of the GI and the rest of the inserts as regular 44 bulbs. The machine really looks great now.

We use them, but don't manufacture them. For me to be doing that, id be sitting in a factory in China, Taiwan or Korea

You can't argue the facts about reliability and current draw with LEDs. Many people including myself are converting a lot of incandescents around the home to LEDs. Christmas display lights are one I started last year. I used to have to replace outdoor lighting frequently because storms and winds would break the filaments. No more of these problems with LEDs. Many more color choices with these products as well. You would have maybe 2 or 3 choices of color temperatures of white and maybe one style of other colors. Now you can get LEDs with many, many more hues and color choices. It's the wave of the future, and yes - it may not look right in an antique pinball machine and not give you that nostalgic feeling...comparable to putting a modern digital amplifier in an antique Victrola. For some folks, that just isn't going to be popular. So are LEDs better? Yes. Do you want to put them in your antiques? That's up to you.

Clear-domed incandescent style LEDs are great for GI. I would personally use them in an EM. I have them in a '77 EB. Yeah, it's not an EM, but it's the same general look/feel. Looks great.

That's because your GI is AC. Put a bridge rectifier and a filter cap on the output to convert it to DC and you won't have a strobing effect.

You need to proudly wear one of these, Levi!

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who died and made you dictator of my machines?

who died and made you dictator of all pinball?

I guess a lot of us pinheads are into wasting money then. I just made another CT order today

The "warm" retro LED's look great in my Abra Ca Dabra & City Of Gold & Bad Cats. Huge improvement, even an LED hater thought they looked like incandescents and looked good. I think it's just how you use the LED's. I would only put retro's in older machines. They are a little brighter than incandescents of course but you can still look directly at the bulb, just like incandescents.

City Of Gold I had to re-heat and flatten plastics, Abra and bad cats I had to get an entire set of new plastics. All warped/damaged by the heat from evil incandescents.

In a home environment, heat from incandescent bulbs in a game isn't really an issue unless you are leaving your games on 24/7 and if you are doing that you are just foolish.

I prefer LEDs in pinball, and automobiles. Honestly, I just don't like warm candle light at all. I prefer 5k-6k color light. Anything else just looks old, outdated, and in need of an update. I will continue to support LEDs in pinball and I am sure the products and prices will continue to get better and better as well. The improvements when using LEDs are not just less energy usage and less heat. The ability to choose the color of light, the ability to place the LEDs almost anywhere you want to light in any direction, and the ability to immediately flash on and off with no slow fade either way. These are pluses to me.

But you can definitely go overboard! In my opinion as long as the GI is done tastefully and the inserts are not blinding most LED swaps look great and are a huge improvement. BUT WOZ showed us all how NOT to do LED lighting. The GI in WOZ is non-existant. The GI in WOZ is absolutely unacceptable. I cannot believe anyone during the development of that game thought that the GI was at a high enough quality for the rest of the game. If your inserts are THAT ridiculously bright and your GI is so bad, how do you think people can correctly track the ball?

Sums it up. The technology IS better. There are right ways and wrong ways to apply it

Really??? So you are a scientist and you know the heat output of incandescent vs. LED over specified amounts of time. How long does it take for an incandescent lamp to reach full operating temperature? 1 min, 5min. 1 hour, 20 hours? The cumulative effect of incandescent vs. LED over time is that regardless of how long you leave them on (because, indeed you do leave them on to play at least a game) the game with LEDs will last longer (the circuits, lamps, and anything affected by temperature such as plastics or backglass) than the incandescent ones.

You won't notice the effects between the two types of lighting, because they are slow like glaciers. But I GUARANTEE the game with LEDs will fare better in the long haul.

I agree with MXV. I have had plenty of 50 year old games with nice original plastics and back glasses. They never had an LED in them ever? Many of them I pulled 44s out of. So I think the excessive heat argument gets overplayed.

Of course we have also seen many glasses where heat contributed to shortening their life. With that said many specific model glasses are almost always bad. It's not just heat that kills them. The inks that were used, cold and moisture are factors too.

I think most that get offended by the anti-LED argument are probably DMD guys at heart. It is good technology that certainly has it's place. If I owned modern games I would certainly use them. Repinning connectors isn't something I enjoy. It would be interesting though to see how many all Em guys are also pro LED.

I guess the real head scratcher for me is people defend the retro LEDs that mimic incandescents. You pay more to get as close as you can to the original look with minimal benefit. I don't really have a problem with that but it's just so much cheaper and easier to use the original bulb to achieve the original look.

Kind of hard to "overplay" the facts.. I think.

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I turn my Ems on for a half an hour at a time. My basement temp averages 62º-64º. I have a 1951 Gottlieb Globetrotter that has original glass and plastics. The glass only had a couple minor chips in it when I got it. 63 years old with a majority of it's life with 44 bulbs behind it. Your going to tell me I need to LED my wood rail now to save the glass?

I was right there with you and then... It's a personal choice really. There are benefits to both so the argument may never end. Many get excited about technology. It comes and goes, I personally favor nostalgia.

It doesn't matter a whole lot what the ambient temp is when the heat from the bulbs is trapped behind the glass - in fact that may be worse because the surface temp of the glass is much lower on the exterior while the interior is hotter, temp differences that may cause distortion of the glass and paint.

I like and agree with all the technological benefits of LEDs. In some games, LEDs make appealling visual choices to me. In some of my games there are a combination of LEDs and incandescents - by choice. My old Ballys had incandescent in the backboxes, but I admit the real, soft glow of the incans was what I left in the playfield GI. My EM bowler will never have LEDs in it - by my choice it has to look the era.

Oh, well there you go. You do have an Em. You were arguing pretty hard for LEDs and your one of us after all.

Alex, you are the last guy I would argue with about any of this.
I use the heat example as an excuse more than reality. 47 bulbs reduce the heat plenty. But man, if you could see the way that Pit Stop backglass glows with the warm white minis that came behind it, you might be a little hesitant to remove them.

If someone else did it before me and it looks good, I'm leaving it! But I have lots of 47s in stock for those that didn't.

LOL! I don't know if being "one of you" is a good thing - you're like aliens or something, you EM guys!

We're passionate if anything.

It's all good. "If it makes you happy, it can't be that bad." Some that I've seen aren't terrible but I'm not sold yet.

Not aliens, but we are on the lookout for them.
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Old topic, but new take... https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/stealth-led-a-recommended-recipe-for-ems

its strictly preference, just because you don't like it does not mean the rest of the population agrees.
If you over paid for the pin, which you did, you can afford to swap them out.