LED light bulbs are the future. They're better for the environment and the pocket book. But for some people, certain LEDs lights — particularly holiday lights—are also a problem. They flicker in a way that causes headaches, nausea and other discomfort. Today, we visit the "Flicker Queen" to learn why LEDs flicker — and what you can do about it.Wondering about other quirks of lighting and engineering? Email us at shortwave@npr.org – we might cover it on a future episode!

That story explains why I dislike led lights

    • Matt@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      10·
      11 months ago

      Most LEDs are based on a “blue pump”, which means the chip produces a lot of intensity in the blue wavelength range. Color temperatures are produced by adding more phosphor to the chip surface. The phosphor only allows certain wavelengths of color through, and the more phosphor added means the LED will appear warmer in color. More phosphor means more expensive though, which is why lots of LEDs are produced in the 7 to 5k range. Even when adding more phosphor to the chip and having a warmer color temperature, there is still blue light being produced and that can impact your sensitivity. Companies such as BIOS Lighting produce chips that don’t use a blue pump. Long story short, it’s a really complicated field that is long overdue for multiple layers of government regulation.

    • pelespirit@sh.itjust.works
      113·
      11 months ago

      There are a lot of good articles about it. Explained in a rudimentary way, it’s super hard to make good reds for LED and has been a problem since its inception. OLEDs use little organic red pixels and the blacks turn off all light instead of replicating a black. It’s super interesting. When I was in school, they brought a major LED inventor to show us what they had, it wasn’t good quality light at the time and for a long time afterwards. OLED was the first time I saw good reds. If you go to a costco, look at the difference between the reds on the same pic, can you tell there is a difference or does it all look sort of magenta? That’s how you can tell if it’s a good OLED or not. To be fair though, you can mess with the settings to make it look shitty which some stores do to sell more of a certain type of tv.

        • pelespirit@sh.itjust.works
          21·
          11 months ago

          No light is emitted? Not sure how to clarify that for you. Instead of making a super dark blue, green, purple, etc., it turns out the light.

            • uid0gid0@lemmy.world
              1·
              11 months ago

              OLED pixels are self emissive, which means each pixel emits its own light. Normal LED screens need a backlight (usually coming in from the edges) so you get light bleeding into what should be black pixels. OLEDs just turn off the pixel entirely. Some new LED screens are starting to be fully backlit which eliminates the light bleed problem but they are not widespread yet.