Blue LEDs: Where Do You Stand?

[Donger]

I've noticed a particularly disturbing trend in consumer electronics: the blue LED. I hate blue LEDs. Got the wife a new laptop, and it is replete with the little fuckers. Power LED? Blue! Volume LEDs? Blue! WiFi LED? fucking blue!!

I went and bought a new home phone system today, and what color LEDs display the charge indication? BLUE!

Perhaps it's just me, but I find them to be incredibly unpleasant upon which to look.

Am I alone in this hatred?

[Donger]

Originally Posted by Skip Towne

Blue LED's rock.

No apostrophe!

I'm not surprised that I'm in the minority, considering all the stuff with blue LEDs out there. Surely, they did some market research (or something) beforehand.

[Luke]

Back in the day Fender Amplifiers always had red jewel covers for their on/off switches. In the late 60's they started making blue and green. Might have been the acid but I always liked the blue lights myself.

LED (light emitting diodes) began as red replacements for light bulbs, the different colors have been a long time coming, gonna be a long time gone......

[Sweet Daddy Hate]

Originally Posted by Luke

Back in the day Fender Amplifiers always had red jewel covers for their on/off switches. In the late 60's they started making blue and green. Might have been the acid but I always liked the blue lights myself.

LED (light emitting diodes) began as red replacements for light bulbs, the different colors have been a long time coming, gonna be a long time gone......

You can buy replacement "jewels" for the amps in 5 or so different colors now.

[Reaper16]

Blue is sweet.

[ArrowheadHawk]

Blue is cool.

[Donger]

Blue is too bright.

[007]

meh. I don't care what color they are. They are all for decoration which is friggin pointless.

[Rain Man]

As more trivia, one color - red or blue - is much more visible at a distance, and the other is very poorly visible at distances. I can't remember which is which. Anyway, navy ships use one of those colors on their lighting because it's very poorly visible from distances. Any former navy guys know the color? I think it's red.

[banyon]

Red is associated with doom and destruction thanks to XBOX 360.

[Donger]

Originally Posted by Rain Man

As more trivia, one color - red or blue - is much more visible at a distance, and the other is very poorly visible at distances. I can't remember which is which. Anyway, navy ships use one of those colors on their lighting because it's very poorly visible from distances. Any former navy guys know the color? I think it's red.

I would imagine that red goes farther, with its longer wavelength.

[Hydrae]

Originally Posted by Rain Man

Here's an interesting bit of trivia. I did a study for a stadium scoreboard manufacturer about ten years ago, and learned about different scoreboard technologies. Apparently blue LEDs were a holy grail for a long time, because the materials to produce them were extremely costly. Red was cheap and easy to produce, but blue was more or less impossible. Apparently they finally figured out a way to do it, and I suspect that blue LEDs became popular just because there was pent-up demand.

Blue is an interesting color especially with it being one of the primary colors. It occurs very seldom in nature. I always found it interesting that they have never perfected a true blue rose (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_rose) even though it has been tried for centuries.

[Rain Man]

Originally Posted by Donger

I would imagine that red goes farther, with its longer wavelength.

It would appear that you are correctomundo.

http://http://www.visualillusion.net/Chap15/Page03.php

Before the war began, a Brazilian battleship launched in this country was provided with a system of blue lights for use when near the enemy at night. Blue was adopted doubtless for its low range compared with light of other colors. We know that the setting sun is red because the atmospheric dust, smoke, and moisture have scattered and absorbed the blue and green rays more than the red and yellow rays. In other words the penetrating power of the red and yellow is greater than that of the blue rays. This country made use of this expedient to some extent. Of course, all other lights were extinguished and portholes were closed in ocean travel during the submarine menace.

http://http://www.worsleyschool.net/...cattering.html

The questions about blue light first arose when we were looking at how to demonstrate that white light is made up of different colours, using glow tubes.

We had previously noticed that the blue Christmas lights on our home, while nice and bright in the yard, were invisible from the road. The question we asked was 'Why does blue light seem to fade out with distance, while red and yellow don't?'

The answer has to do with air ... the molecules that light must pass through to get to your eye. In order to explain what happens to the light, you'll need to remember that ordinary white light contains all the colours of the spectrum.


The fact that white light is made up of all the colours of the rainbow was demonstrated by Isaac Newton using a prism. White light passed into the prism came out in a spectrum, because the glass caused the different colours to slow down by different amounts, changing their angles of exit. This phenomenon is called refraction.

As white light from the sun enters our atmosphere, it must pass through this gas, which is composed mostly of nitrogen and oxygen molecules, before it can reach the surface. As it passes through, each of the different colours in the light interact with the air molecules.

A simple way to describe what happens would be to say that the air molecules, which are about 0.0004 millimeters in diameter, are very close in size to the waves of blue light. Other colours have bigger or smaller waves, and mostly pass right through, but the blue light waves hit the air molecules and scatter in all directions. As the sunlight comes down through the atmosphere, the blue light in it gets scattered all over the place. Some of this scattered light (there's a lot of it) reaches our eyes, making the sky seem blue. The sunlight that's left that finally reaches the ground has lost most of its blue light, leaving it yellowish in colour, so the sun itself appears yellow.

In space, there is no air to scatter the different colours in light, so the sun would look white and the 'sky' would be black.

This also explains why blue lights get dimmer with distance. If you're far enough away from the blue Christmas lights decorating your house, much of the blue light from them gets scattered every which way, and there wasn't very much of it to start with, so very little of it gets to your eye. You can't see the bulbs.

[teedubya]

I think I may change my avatar to a Blue LED, now.

[chasedude]

When I got my new Samsung TV there was this annoying blue LED light at the bottom of the set. I found it very distracting from the movie experience. Luckily going through the menu I found a setting to shut it off. Thank you Samsung for the disable option.

[patteeu]

Originally Posted by NewPhin

I like them and find them to be more soothing than red or amber.

Same