Why does every small appliance or useful home electronics item have the BRIGHTEST LEDs in them?
I bought a new fan for our bedroom Sunday. It has 4 speed settings, and LEDs to display which setting you’re on.
Just like every other electrical device in our bedroom, I had to cover the LEDs with electrical tape because they are TOO DAMM BRIGHT. That one light was more than bright enough for me to see in the room with all the lights off.
I can’t sleep well if there’s a lot of light like that, especially blue light, and it’s like every fucking electronics manufacturer used the same extra bright blue LEDs.
All of our power strips have them. Same brightness.
The fans have them.
Don’t even get me started on digital clocks and the plague of bright LEDs that they bring about
Many charging plugs have them built into the plug itself.
Even some fucking light switches have them now!
I have about 6 different things in our bedroom that have electrical tape over their completely unnecessary LEDs.
Why has this become such a common thing? Is this really something most people want? To have a room that is never actually dark even with the lights turned off?
From an electronic tech perspective… I’ve been replacing the LEDs in anything that annoys me with a dull red and a resistor valued to keep it barely visible. It’s a tad more eloquent than tape. Most things don’t need a led at all. I’d love to see manufacturers switch to an e paper solution with a simple “on” or “off” displayed. And I hate standby led’s.
I can’t imagine any device that needs a sign telling you whether is on or off.
When you look at your tv, can you tell if it’s on? What about your car, your phone, your furnace, your microwave? If one needed a sign to tell them those things are on, it would be a miracle they could even use them at all.
A lot of small electronic devices without screens(which are quite common) probably need something. That said, an ultra-bright LED, especially blue, which seems to be the most annoying, is not the way to go.
High CRI warm white?
For my old TV, the RED power LED is very helpful. Sometimes its on the wrong input, and very rarely something has gone wrong and I need to unplug-replug it in to fix the display. LED saves me clicking the power button when it’s already on.
It’s kind of big red dot, but not bright which I’m grateful for.
I hate the fact that my NVidia Shield has no indicator to tell whether it’s running at all. The first time I plugged it in it wouldn’t work and I was about to return it. Turned out the HDMI cable was bad, but not being able to see if the device even received power made it a pain to trouble shoot.
If it didn’t need a sign it didn’t need a light… some things need an indicator. A . 5 inch square bit of e ink is way better because it casts no light. And if a manufacturer thinks you need a light … Then you get a light … Need it or not. So …
If it doesn’t need a sign … It didn’t need a light.
Or even just design it better. My Logitech snowball has a massively bright led that sticks out. It’s about 1mm by 2mm and sticks out about .5mm. Whatever happened to a pinhole? It would serve the same visual notification but not be blinding