Depends on how you play, and how good your eyesite is. I don't have any issues seeing the vast well lit middle playfield of Wh20.

Incandescent bulbs look great in a well lit room. I enjoy a more seedy environment to play my games in. I need the LED's in order to see what's going on.

Yeah Baby! Thats my Game room!

Mine too. Have a lot of your LED's in my games.

Glad Im not the only one with a Seedy Game Room.

I leave open beer, food, and a sticky floor! Wife loves me!
only when the local drunks and hos hang around do I get in trouble!!!

Heres my seedy whitewater that everyone hates but me! Sometimes bad taste can be good!

Time for a better picture.

wh2o.jpg

Yes! I think cool white has its place (think "futuristic" pins like Iron Man, DM, JM). But I just don't like the look much even on games with lots of blues in the art like WH20, it ends up looking too much like crappy florescent office lighting and really robs the hand-drawn art of that "warm" feeling. Warm white GI is the way to go for 90% of games.

Colored LEDs in the GI are almost universally a bad idea. There's a reason you'll find art in a museum generally lit with neutral light -- so you can see the art! Of course if the game has a terrible art package or is worn to hell, color-bombing might help to hide the mess.

As vid1900 notes, you also really need to consider fade effects before you install LEDs. They'll look like crap with LEDs unless you turn them off (in which case you'll miss them, may or may not matter depending on the title and how much they're used) or install a LED OCD / GI OCD ($150 each, but well worthwhile IMO).

I really dont get you ppl mentioning the fade effects... I have warm whites that are seen and cool whites that are hidden. I fully see the fade effects with my leds. Not sure why you guys keep yammering on about it.

Oh well, come play my WH20 and get your ass kicked and then blame it on the LEDS!

Because LEDS cannot fade correctly...it's just a fact everyone involved wishes wasn't the case.

All of my system11 pins have incandescent bulbs in the inserts, due to the fact that they looks so much better when fading in and out than LED's do...

No one ever saw the middle of a pinball playfield until 2009.

The period from 1947 to 2008 was know as the Dark Ages.

I don't get it. My White Water looks pretty well lit with incandescent bulbs.

WhiteWater.jpg

So does the room though

Absolutely not. That room has a rope light around the upper edge and two bulbs in the ceiling behind little square frosted 1950 glass. Very dark room if anyone who has been there reads this they will agree.

Here is an older picture with neon beer lights on the far wall. but the WH2O picture I just took and had no neon on.

GameroomSmall.jpg

It looks 20 years old!!!

Thank you. Considering it is 22 years old

Nothing more beautiful than the soft glow of burning filament inside an incandescent bulb.

"Not hating"? Dude, you just said 7 hateful (and mostly wrong) things about incandescent bulbs.

I remember going to the arcade in the early 80s, my heart fairly leaping with anticipation. But when we got there, we couldn't see the playfields. I was so disappointed, I went next door and spent all my quarters on 15-second lap dances.

These pictures were just taken with no room lighting, no ambient lighting at all. 100% self-lit pins. I'm sure someone will say "yeah, but the camera adjusts its iris for the lower lighting", but guess what? That's how eyes work too. Make sure you view these full screen, so that your iris isn't biased by the lighting of your browser window.

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My advice is to stop reading this thread now and never to consider this topic again, once you figure out what you're missing you'll never be able not to see it, and you'll have to install LED OCD on all of your machines!

I think sometimes is one of them escalating battle situations. People put all LED GI, which makes the edges of the game really bright...which sort of makes the middle darker? Anyway, this has been a theory of mine for awhile, I'm trying to justify why people are constantly adding spotlights to PFs that didn't come with it.

It's not just a theory; it's a physiological fact. Bright light closes down your iris (shirnks your pupils), which makes the lesser-lit areas look dim by comparison.

But it's also true that some games just had poorly-designed lighting to begin with. In the Dirty Harry picture above, I added 4 spotlights. [EDIT: I just realized the spots over the slings don't have anything in them - I forgot that I was experimenting with different LEDs and left them empty]. I plan to add some spotlights to LOTR and Congo too, eventually. I use 1SMD LEDs in the spotlights; that's the one place where I don't like #555 bulbs.

It is like people think they know more than the designer on how it should look. As you can see from my picture above White Water is well lit exactly as Dennis Nordman wanted it to look. So the incandescent makes for a dark PF argument is debunked and just a straw-man excuse to mod a game. The colors you see on the playfield and plastics are the colors the artist chose. If they wanted a totally blue game they would have made it they way. They didn't.

Yup

I don't remember my DH looking dark. Right now it is in The Sanctum and too well lit to judge. But I'll have to take a closer look.

There are some games that are suppose to have a dark look for mood. I think TZ is supposed to look that way and Creech is a Drive In Theater.

That's what I was thinking

I'm not anti-LED, and I'm still trying to find the right LED bulbs to use in my Shadow GI. Right now, I'm leaning toward sunlight 2-LED bulbs near the Sanctum (lots of orange and red), and cool 2-LED bulbs everywhere else (lots of blue).

My before and after pics are in the 1st post here:

https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/the-spotlight-thread

It was playable before, but I liked having the buildings and the Clints all lit up.

One "color" of bulb was good enough for the GI when it was made. Your statement sounds like a gateway to future clown puking

As always my 2 cents.

Like going to Home Depot, and seeing 40w, 60w, and 100w bulbs.
LEDs come in a large range of brightness.
Add in now lens, and direction. None, shoots light straight up, Frosted, diffuses to a fuzzy ball glow, Op-Max over 300 degrees and 3x as bright.

These are all personal choices, and some of those have been mentioned here.
How is the room lit?
How is playing, how old or how are their eyes?
Height or angle of the player....where a single LED can ruin your line of sight.

Games like WH20 were pretty damn well designed for most of its light placement, other then perhaps the boulders.
So Incandescent happens to look pretty good, IMO on this game.
Correctly done LEDs will look nice too.
James posted a beautiful picture of his, Excellent Job, my friend! I believe would be done with all 1 SMD 5050 bulbs.
For anothers, this is too much.

For me personally, I blend everything. I dont think I have but 1 game that has all the same bulbs in all the sockets.
I know thats a PITA for most all, but for me, its like my home. Every Lamp and light is not lit with 100 Watt bulbs.
I like some mood and darkness....some mystery behind the caves.
Yet, I see the other side, light it all up and see everything bright and even.

I dont think a consensus will ever be reached, because of our personal differences, but knowing the options that one can do, is
at least the best way to not "do it wrong"

^^^

I wouldn't bother with LEDs at all if I didn't think they made things better. I have a mix of LEDs and #44s in MET and IM. IM has some very red areas that look great lit with #44 bulbs. But I like cool white LEDs under War Machine and the lane guides. It looks good to me.

And eventually, most of my pins will have LED feature lamps. I have to justify the LED-OCD for some of them, but the improvement is too great to ignore.

This thread needs a little bit of humor...

Just install some of these in your game and be done... you and everyone else wont be able to see anything - so everyone will be happy. Order now for delivery in time for Thanksgiving!

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I've made my bias for warm white GI clear already, but I'll repeat it for Shadow since that's what I've got in mine (Comet warm white 1SMD 50/50s in the GI and behind Aurich's alternate translite) and it looks excellent. I know people like to match cool white with blue/green and warm white with orange/red/yellow portions of the playfield, but the Shadow in particularly has a beautiful old-fashioned art deco art package that just doesn't look its best with a harsher cool white GI.

I cannot claim to be a purist since I've sacrificed the evidently irreproducible warmth of incandescents for the efficiency and increased brightness of LEDs. So I have to agree that this is ultimately an entirely subjective aesthetic decision. If nothing else LEDs are a readily reversible mod so if the next owner thinks you were gauche (or boringly conservative, for that matter) with your bulb selection, they're free to change it.

That said, warm white is plainly the way to go for Shadow GI!

Very nice job with the leds. Really gives a great water effect, almost like underwater lighting.

I can't understand all the LED hate here. I agree colored led in most gi looks horrid, but I think cool or warm whites in gi looks awesome. Also color matched inserts. Just makes the game pop. AND saves a little wear and team on the circuits.

To each his own!

Say what? If by iris you mean pupil, you have it exactly backwards. In low light, the iris expands, opening up the pupil to absorb as much ambient light as possible. In bright light areas, the iris contracts, narrowing the pupil to filter out the unneeded extra ambient light.

Do you have a pic of the Shadow? My GI was done by someone who REALLY liked purple, and it's next in the queue to be re-done. I was going to go sunlight since it hasn't failed me yet.

I'll try to snap one tonight with the usual caveat that it's very tough to capture lighting well in photos! I haven't tried sunlight, in the pics it looks in-between warm and cool so I've always just gone with warm on the theory that it's closest to incandescent.

I will admit that as a relative Noob I am mostly just overwhelmed by LED's. It sounds like it requires a ton of trial and error with warm whites, cold whites, color matched inserts, frosted, etc etc. I cant afford the price of that many trial and error attempts. In the pics on this site, I loathe probably 7 out of 10 LED set ups I see pictures of. But I will admit that some do look good.

I recently purchased a Taxi with very tasteful LED's and it is starting to convert me. I almost think these look very different in person with the naked eye rather than a photograph. But I gotta say - some of the photos people put on here are attrocious.

Some are just horrendous.

You gotta have something to tinker with in those moments in between the game breaking down.

Please tell me where you see "LED hate".

Sorry, you're right - the iris closes down. But the point stands.

It's very hard to take a good picture of an LED'ed pin, and they do usually look much better in person.

Did I hit a nerve or something? Relax dude. Just seems like there's a lot of dislike (synonym to "hate") of leds here. Don' t take my comment so personal.

Nothing personal at all, I just think you're wrong. Just because some of us prefer incandescants in some situations doesn't mean we hate/dislike LEDs. And as I mentioned several times in this thread, I LIKE LEDs when used properly (like jrivelli's WH2O).

I think you're misreading critiques of specific LED jobs as attacks on LEDs in general.

I personally find blue GI LEDs tricky. It it the one color that can ruin a game. Most of the time it washes out all the other colors, and makes everything look dark, while still blinding you with blue light. Better go with (warm) white. Maybe teal would work in those cases but it's not a very standard (or cheap) color.

A tip I have for placing GI LEDs on a large scale: take a 1/4" screwdriver, and remove the GI sockets from the back, remove the lamp, but the LED back in, and screw back on the wood. I've almost never removed the plastics on my machines.

Me too! Try Ice Blue!