Thanks. The top two pics are with Comet 2smd frosted whites. My wife played a few games last night and said how she liked that she could actually see the game now!
I'd like to try a fire bulb from comet under the fireball plastic

I guess they removed the lightning flippers because the strobe flash-bulb handicap was enough.

Wow, that fish tales looks amazing. Makes me want to own one again. Compare the backglass, which has been highly accentuated with just the right LED scheme to look brilliantand vibrant with highly contrasting colors, to the one posted before it with incandescents where all the colors contain the same orange/ yellow wash to which really diminishes a lot of the color contrast and especially adversely affects the blues. It's also a more accurate representation of the art as this is what it was meant to look like in print, and the heavy warming from incandescent bulbs is more of an unfortunate and unintended consequence. For a higher stimulation of the senses the LED's offer are much more scintillating experience. But, thats just how I see it.

I see it as a big, bright reflection on the glass.

As with most they just took it too far. Do you really think the artist meant for the wave caps to be purple? I thought cool whites were the best behind the blue waves. Cool white works behind blues and greens yet it doesn't wash out the contrast. I think that is my issue with colored bulbs. While they provide a more intense color, they wash out the details. They can be used, but they have to be used very thoughtfully.

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I don't totally hate the blue. I actually prefer blue pop bumpers on the game, but that's in the underwater area of the shark. Again, they just took a good idea too far IMHO. They lost all of the yellow, orange, red, and green that's also a major part of the playfield. I don't mind the color matching of the fish inserts. That's an example where it looks good either way. Having said that, I'm fine with whatever people want to do with their machines. I just need to find another Fish Tales.

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I think this collage might help to show the different versions of using color in a backglass.

1) Color Wash
2) Nothing
3) Few Color LEDs

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PS: I don't mind the color wash here as much as on a game where they have a section of green, a section of red, a section of purple, etc. Here you could at least make a case that it's going for a new art style. It reminds me of the game like Mad World, where there is a conscious choice to only work with a few colors.

#3 is by far the best...

Look at how much detail in the art is lost. You can't tell me the original artist in any way would consider that an improvement!

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Yeah, that's a case where I think you actual gain detail by adding colored LEDs. It's not like you're just coloring the sky blue randomly either. If anything it helps it to match with the rest of the machine.

Youre example is correct, and the color bomb looks awful. But honestly most of us dont care what the original artist thinks, he is never going to see my games. If he did see them and got offended, I dont care.

This Fish Tales is a good case study. The problem is that many will not care. They walked up to this machine at a show, OOooohhhed and Aaahhhd at it.

Ive done way too many fish tales

A couple Ice Blue, all 3 Kelvins in white, and the right brightness in the letters...

Approx 6 different type bulbs. What I see when color is added, is all 1 SMD or brighter, and Dark Blue for Water.
sometimes buffered by Purple, or creating Purple to the eye and camera from mixing,

If one wants to add color, Im fine, please dont hate me, just spend a few bucks and add some lower brightness, or leave a few out of the backbox.

Its lighting art, and there are all kinds of "tools" in bulb selection that can make a difference.

No light bleed on colors for letters, or objects, balance the brightness in the remainder, add if your over the top, add additional Matrix strips with dimmers on them and scale back the lighting.

Create a depth of field, if you want the art to pop and get a 3D affect, in this case, the Green Fish being the brightest object.

Cameras cannot capture this, no matter how Ive tried.

All, just IMO, and my Experiences. This does not work for all Backboxes...not at all. But many,
I use Incandescent mixed with LEDs many times too.

Sounds like you should write a guide for this.

I did that a lot. For the longest time I couldn't find a warm white I was happy with. Now more often then not it's the 10mm from Comet, but it's still an option.

I did in threads, and then on the website in principals...people dont read.
Pages had very low hit counts.

It requires an Inventory of many bulbs, an extra couple hundred dollars.

Everyone sees light different, as well as Ambient home lighting.
You know, Play in the dark, light up a game like a Christmas Tree!

Im not against it, I just dont think all games need it or look good.

Sure, I want to see the Ball, but I like darkness too.....Too much yin, not enough yang.

this is one of the rare cases you can get away with a color bulb in art. Mostly because the art is one color, and it's on black. I'm referring to the clouds in the background. Looks like the bulbs were kept far enough away from the surrounding art, so they did not bleed into the other artwork. Which is critical. and 99.7% of the time, you cannot get away with it. This is the .3% time you can get away with a little.

BTW, i'm talking about example 3. Example 1 is horrible and the person that did it should be flogged. Example 2 looks great, and example 3 looks good as well.

Look at just the Red color in the pictures.

People reading this thread see all the detail of the color washed out.
Thats what the camera took, and it may or may not be how it looks in person.
No way of knowing. until a physical look.
If the bulb is a 1 SMD or Brighter, it would be wrong, IMO.
It should be a single LED at most, maybe a 2 LED frosted,
It might be a flat top, I sanded the top only to diffuse.

The attempt is to light the box red, and only the box, but not too bright, or too light.

In the absence of having 10 different red bulbs to try, its simpler to use a white frosted and be done.

who stares at the backbox anyway?

The point is if color is used in a backbox, it should never over power the graphics.

And if you have white water or other games with water and you want blue, get Ice blue, and an assortment of brightness of this and blue and think that you are lighting water....Does your result look like water? Or is it a bunch of Blue Blob creeping into the rest.

Ive had to also make cardboard "dividers" to glue between objects to control light bleed, when I wanted to use color.

For me, the debate isnt Yes or No...Use color or dont, use LEDs, or dont, its more a matter of do what you want, but make it look good.

I could be wrong, but I think there is a hint of blue in the clouds even without the LEDs. It's just very tough to see with the warmness of the incandescent. I do agree it's key to just trying different things. It reminds me of getting fitted for glasses; "Do you like 1 or 2?" Jurassic Park was a machine I did where I thought for sure it was going to be one way, but it ended up being different. I ended up using 7 different whites. Here is how that turned out:

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PS: The bulbs at the bottom are incandescent blinkers. I feel like they add a sense of action/motion.

I'm sure I'm not the only person to use some type of shield or block on an LED for this exact reason. Electrical Tape is rated well beyond the mild warmth on an LED. A little of it on an LED and you can easily direct the light the direction you want. Is it really that difficult to stop light? This completely reverses your 99.7% to go the other way.

As to the JP above me, I have one too and LEDs just don't work in it. That translite is so damn thin you get hot spots with incandescents. I tried so many different things, In the end I think I ended up with one white LED directly in the sun and maybe a couple frosted reds in the top left. Everything else blasted through the translite. What I did do is change the ones on top to red and orange and you can light up the marquee to match the sunset, it looks awesome.

I find it ironic that a thread started for the purpose of laughing at over-done / over-colored games has turned into one of the better discussions on the use of LEDs.

It's not ironic, the thread was about Clown Puke LEDs, which is the extreme end of the scale. It's not anti-LED, it's anti Clown Puke.

The above are *good* uses of LEDs. I'm anti-clown puke but I have LEDs in the backboxes of my games.

I use LEDs for GI in all games, just not colored LEDs. It ruins the carefully drawn artwork.

Yeah, it seems far more useful to discuss the reasoning behind your preference. I'd actually be curious to here the intent behind some of the "clown puke" machines.

I kind of like BSD with blue and red gi but don't know that I would do my game like that.

Or Sunlight...95% of my games....worth a try.....

Well Art, I ordered sacks of Frosted Warm from you after seeing your recommendation to Jim at The Sanctum.

I had older games like Dirty Harry next to new games like Stern KISS. The new games were so bright they made my game look like it was turned off. So 2 SMD frosted Warm in the GI made it brighter, but unchanged look wise.

Then for dark games with blue / black themes Art said to go with the cool.

I was not steered wrong.

Jim had requested the Warm White....the Kevin closest to Incandescent. Sunlight is simply a compromise with a Kelvin in between..
Kinda like Goldilocks! Porridge Too Cold, Too Hot, the one in the middle.

Everyones taste is different, and when the threads 4 -5 years ago had constant debates between using Warm vs Cool, I heard this, and made one in between.

Does that make it a lukewarm white??

Well, after Jim was done I was impressed. Even on older games they lit the plastics, kept the color, did not hurt me old eyes directly (that LED vibrations effect) or the worst of the bunch, the reflections off a rolling ball that make you think a high speed disco ball is flying around.

You make a very wise point with the reflection off the ball.
It bothers me too.....I wonder how many others?

I just finished replacing about 70 of the GI and back box illumination LEDs with incandescents...and took out the color dmd and coin door....

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Heres a before pic...

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I was wondering WTF you were talking about when you said coin door. The I saw the last pic. Wow. What did you do with it? Looks like a cool piece of art. Do you have a better picture? Is it a painted door or a plate?

As for the ColorDMD? I am biased. I have 14 I think. But the are all LCD. The only LED version I have played with was a friend had on in a Fish Tales and I hated it, piercing. The LCD version with different option from colored / Sigma, Dot Size, brightness, is fine to me. But I am biased.

As for the Blue and Red back corners, take a look at my fake colored picture back a page. Puke.

It was a plate, painted not a decal..it came from Germany and was on the game when I bought it. It drew a bit of heat in my for sale thread 2 weeks ago, people seemed to hate it. The guy I bought the game from said when I sell the MM, if the new buyer didn't want the skin he would like to buy it back so I sold it to him and bought a traditional coin door for the game...

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Very cool. It is a neat piece of art. But I personally am an originalist and a mod hater. That said -

Here is my off topic rant. "Coin Doors". It is so funny how people shell out $Big for a collector piece of a coin op game. But no intention of having a coin ever pass through the slot.

But heaven forbid you make a "home model" without the coin door it is practically worthless.

But that is cool. Eh, I'm a bit of a hypocrite.

No, I think people buy them because they look nice and are more appealing than the plain, stock speaker grills. I mean if it's glare on the glass they want, there is already plenty from the pesky DMD and translite (what were they thinking putting those on games?!? They cause glare!!!) and that glare is right in the middle of the game.

....but what I'm really saying is, if someone is bothered so badly by glare, they have most likely already addresses it for the DMD (a glare guard or HDInvisaPDI glass). Personally I use a glare filter on my DMDs (not a bent plastic, but a louvered filter that goes over the DMD) and the speaker lights are pretty much a non-issue unless you are looking for the glare. There is nothing all that important to see in that 2" x 4" area in the very top corners on the games usually unless you want to focus on your Made in the USA sticker. If you are looking for glare, the translite is much worse than any glare from the speaker lights as it is a bigger area and right in the middle of the playfield.

It seems strange that any concerns of the speaker lights causing distracting glare hasn't been mentioned since they were first launched 5 years ago and now in the past week it has cropped up in posts twice. I have been selling them myself for over 3 years (though I was always involved with making and designing them) and have yet to receive even one e-mail commenting on any glare. Also...the light kits can be dimmed.

What's next, are people going to start asking if the acrylic designs block the sound when they are used? Or possibly just saying they do. In case you are wondering...no the sound is not effected when you use the acrylic designs with the Speaker Light Kits. That was yet another non-issue that people seemed concerned about when the Speaker Light Kits were first rolled out.

In any case...I think games look better with my Speaker Light Kits in them than without them. If I didn't, I wouldn't be selling them.

Doug (SpeakerLightKits.com)

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We all are...

that game looks wayyy better. Now that's a game that will sell.

Like I said, "more glare".

Not much more than a DMD will cause. Get a BentPlastic and go on with your life.

So your thought if I understand it is, buy ugly speaker lights that add glare, then spend more money for a glare guard to block the glare from the lights you don't like. Sounds like a great plan.

I have them on all my machines so I can go on living my life free of glare.

Looks like the tornado consumed the Skittles factory!

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Here's a good comparison. Just look at all the color and artwork you lose.

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Try turning the room lights for both pics. You're not really comparing apples to apples if you take pics if one game with the room lights on and the other in the dark.

I'm willing to bet this game doesn't look nearly as bad as you make it out to be in this photo, come on -do you expect me to believe you play in a room this dark? I'll bet with some ambient room lighting this game isn't bad at all. I have a little colored GI in my Taxi for accents (upper playfield, blue in the lanes etc.) and it looks great.

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I often play in a completely dark room. Adds to being totally immersed in the game!

I do not have any pictures, but I just wanted to say that I support this thread 100%.
-Kyros

That's fine. I've played. In the dark occasionally. I'm saying there is a big difference between playing in the dark and taking photos in the dark.

Pulled this off Craigslist today...

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