South Berwick, ME
There seems to be endless threads on this topic but none with a very concise or scientific explanation of any of it. I'll be correcting this soon with a compendium of all the different available LEDs with color and light accurate photos of examples of all of them. Stay tuned. But for now, I rant on....
Quoted from Geofflove:The problem with LEDs isn't just the colour, it’s the quality of light. Incandescent lamps emit light across a wide spectrum rendering colours accurately (or at least as we are used to seeing them). Unless you get an LED with a high CRI (which you can get at a cost for lighting in colour sensitive environments) then it has a narrower band of frequencies of light emitted. The result of this is colour distortion - you might find playfield reds appear faded for example. This is the real killer and a key reason why leds don’t look ‘right’ to many people.
Until someone makes hi CRI leds for pinballs then the problem will persist. And I suspect for cost reasons that will never happen.
I also believe people have varying sensitivity to this. I really struggle with poor quality lighting. It’s just looks terrible to me but others I’ve discussed it with can’t see the problem. YMMV
This is spot on. Thanks for writing this up so I didn't have to.
Quoted from frenchmarky:What's weird is I can have a bunch of warm whites together in a lightboard and yeah they look okay and 'warm', but if I take one out and replace it with a 44, the 44 doesn't look more yellow or orange next to them, it actually looks reddish. But when looking at 44s by themselves they all just look, you know, yellow. As if you'd only have to put just a *little* bit of red tint in the LED lens to get it closer but I'm sure it would take some tinkering. That's the true test of these warm LEDs, put a 44 right next to one.
A keen observation that's in direct relation to the other blockquoted post above. You have to remember that light exists on a full color spectrum and adjusting temperature is just one part of the equation. The axis you're trying to describe is what's measured as "tint" and is usually measured in degrees of +/- 20° (and beyond but you rarely see the need to correct for more than that). LEDs do a really terrible job rendering anything beyond the colors they're programmed to emit and a filament has variation in temperature throughout it which is what contributes to some of that "glow" everybody is talking about.
Quoted from SilverLiningMan:Thanks TwinDavid for putting your finger on something I’ve been thinking about for a while. I would love to see a pinball-style LED available that has the qualities of a vintage style household LED bulb. These are a nice replica of warm incandescents in my opinion, with the amber element giving off a nice glow.
Even those these emulate the "look" of a filament, it doesn't actually emulate the way that light travels off of the "LED filament". Those LEDs are definitely cool because they can give some variation in the direction and quality of the light, but they don't have variance within the filament itself (slightly hotter and slightly colder parts of the winding) that gives some light the quality that you're looking for in a 44/47. Additionally, there's just no way to make a filament like this in the side of a 44/47/555 bulb package.
For everybody saying "they should have figured out a way to do this by now", well, they've gotten extremely close, but it's not going to fit in a 44/47/555.
Quoted from TheLaw:I usually have some real 44s thrown in if the bulb is in your field of view.
This is the proper way to do this job in my book. If you can see the bulb, even a little bit, it's gotta be a 44/47. Bulbs that are completely covered by a plastic, or lane guide you can use a WW LED of either 1SMD or Retro variety depending on their placement.
Backbox needs to be LED'd with Retro or 1SMD bulbs non ghosting.
2SMDs do not belong anywhere on an EM.
I've yet to have strobing issues with LEDs in an EM and I'm not sure how sensitive I am to the effect, but the non-ghosting bulbs are a must have for me.
