Blue LEDs were a technological breakthrough that took decades of work to create and enabled pretty much all modern tech.
Comment on Big Charging doesn't want you to know this one simple weird old trick
gofsckyourself@lemmy.world 3 months ago
This photo is a perfect example of why blue LEDs are shitty.
chiliedogg@lemmy.world 3 months ago
gofsckyourself@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Blue LEDs are great for when you need something blue in particular, but the color is piercing and way too bright. Then they are used as the default without any consideration for any other color.
They are shitty in how they are used, rather than their individual abilities and functions.
fallingcats@discuss.tchncs.de 3 months ago
The brightness is too bright, not the color. The brightness is always a choice by the manufacturer they could easily make it dimmer using the exact same components.
chiliedogg@lemmy.world 3 months ago
You literally can’t make white LEDs without them. That includes all flat-screen display technology. After the development of blue and green LEDs, decades and untold money were spent trying to develop blue LEDs.
The device you’re reading this message on is only possible because of Blue LEDs.
Your issue isn’t with the blue LEDs - it’s with the atmosphere, which absorbs red and green light more quickly than blue. It’s why the sky appears blue. it’s also why white LEDs bulbs will often have a yellow filter on them to absorb some of the blue light. Because pure white appears blue-ish in hue.
pewpew@feddit.it 3 months ago
Without blue LEDs whe wouldn’t have LED lighting
gofsckyourself@lemmy.world 3 months ago
That doesn’t change the fact they are used in situations where they shouldn’t. I don’t like being blinded by a bright piercing blue light all the time.
TheSaus@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 months ago
White LED is blue LED with a facemask
Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 months ago
All the “whites” (warm white, natural white, cold white and so on) on led lights are combinations of red + blue light emitting junctions covered in a phosporous mask to “smooth” the spectrum distribution of the resulting light (otherwise the light would be purelly a peak at a very specific wavelength on the red part of the spectrum and a similar peak on the blue part of the spectrum).
Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 months ago
The most energy efficient kind of light emitting semiconductor junction is the one that emits blue light.
This being a battery bank and assuming that 2x7 segment LED display is always ON, maybe the choice of color for it was driven by that.
gofsckyourself@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Exactly, blue LEDs are cheaper. So, shove them in everything, even if another color or no light at all makes more sense.
Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 months ago
Not cheaper in general, just cheaper compared to equal or more energy efficient solutions.
Red LEDs are cheaper but less energy efficient, whilst more energy efficient solutions like e-Ink are much more expensive and suffer from the problem that they need external lighting to read because e-Ink dots are passive, not emissive.
Mind you, it’s possible to come up with solutions with Red LEDs where their slightly higher consumption is no big deal (for example, a button that need to be pressed to activate the charge-left display, so the LEDs are OFF most of the time rather than ON all the time, so ultimatelly use almost no energy because they’re usually off) but they tend to add cost (no button is cheaper than having a a button) and increase the likelihood of failure or manufacturing defects (adding any kind of mechanical moving part to something which otherwise has no mecanical moving parts adds another, more risky class of failure modes).
In summary, using blue LEDs tends to be the Engineering-optimal solution for these devices, though not the usability-optimal one.