LED Experiments: Making Holiday Lights Less Garish
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN links it in any LED Christmas light discussion as the explanation of why they look off and how to fix it.
What it is
Technology Connections experiments with filtering white and colored LEDs to make holiday lights look less garish. He explains why narrowband LED strings look harsh compared with incandescent bulbs.
Recommended by 3 HN commenters across 3 different months, 2021 to 2024.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec beala · 2024-12 · on “Ask HN: What are the best programmable holiday lights?”
This is a tangent, but I feel like we can't talk about LED christmas lights without linking to this video by tech connections: [this video] the tl;dw is that most color LED lights work by emitting a single frequency of light. Compared to classic christmas lights, which are incandescent filaments filtered through dyed glass, the LED lights look a bit... radioactive. My personal pet peeve are white LED lights. If you're not careful to buy the ones labeled "warm" they look cold, and imo, not very festive and inviting. Of course, this is all a matter of taste, but once I became privy to the difference, I could no longer ignore it. I guess I'm just a millennial nostalgic for the lights of my youth.
Recommends nyanpasu64 · 2021-07 · on “Why we're blind to the color blue”
Technology Connections did some videos on "Making Holiday Lights Less Garish", where instead of using narrowband colored LEDs he filtered white ones: [this video]
Recommends bseidensticker · 2024-02 · on “It was almost impossible to make the blue LED [video]”
The blue is nicer if you do that. Technology Connections has made 3 videos over the last 5 years mostly centering around how he hates the blue led lights used in holiday lights. I think I've only seen the 2 yr old one, but now that I have I can't unsee it. The blue is just too blue. If you see a set that is all blue instead of multi-color it's unbearable. It's just too blue. White light in blue plastic is where it's at. [this video] [LINK] [LINK]