My house is never pitch black unless there’s a power outage… because every DVD player, TV, cable box, and wireless adapter has a blasted glowing LED. Some are less obtrusive than others - and the manufacturers, God bless 'em, installed some kind of dimmer - but others glow like the Kenny Rogers sign outside of Jerry Seinfeld’s window.
I started thinking - surely there’s a more elegant solution than duct tape or sticking a Post-It in front. I thought for sure somebody like 3M would sell some kind of tinted tape that would not completely block the LED, but reduce it. But either it’s called something else, my Google-fu sucks, or it doesn’t exist, because I sure as hell can’t find it.
Anyone know of such a product? Or a good substitute?
I’ve used color-tinted cellophane/acetate sheets - you can buy it in rolls found in the gift wrap section, often. I used some clear tape to tack it in place to dim the bright yellow glow from my alarm clock’s screen.
I’ve used ordinary masking tape on some of my worst offenders. And some of the damned things were almost too bright, even then! (It’s always the BLUE ones!)
The problem with ordinary color filters (like theatrical gels for lighting) is that they pass way too much light, and you’d have to use too many layers to have a significant effect.
If you want to get fiddly about it, try using black electrical tape, with a small hole cut in a key spot to let just a little light out.
I once had a Netgear router where, on the top, there was a circle of blue LEDs. There were maybe 10 of them in this circle, and they would perform a kind of spinning animation that looked pretty cool on my bedroom desk.
Until I turned out the lights and tried to sleep.
They were so bright they lit up the entire room with a pulsating blue light. I mean, really, lit up the room. It was like daylight, blue, spinning daylight. It was like an alien spacecraft had landed in my room and was in a holding pattern.
I had to cover that thing with a ton of electrical tape.
My previous hdtv in my room had a genius feature where the name glowed bright white when the TV was off. Had to cover that with electrical tape as well. It was about 40% too bright.
Now I’ve got a printer on my desk where the power button is a 2 square inch glowing blue square. I have to cover it with a towel.
And I have an external hard drive that has an array of lights that pulsate when the drive is being accessed, which is all the time.
Don’t electronics makers consider that some of this stuff might be going into rooms where people are trying to sleep?
Someone really should invent tinted tape, if they haven’t already. It wouldn’t be too difficult. Take clear tape, add some black to the plastic batch, bingo bango.
I have this same problem too and was just thinking about buying some do-it-yourself car tinting stuff. Would that work? I was thinking something like this: http://store.diyhut.com/20rotibyfo.html
Catalogs used to sell colored tape for gift wrapping, I don’t know if anyone makes it anymore. I think Ferret Herder had a better idea, anyway. Lots of places sell cellophane for gift wrapping.
Another possibilty would be taping colored wrapping tissue over the light.
How about the fire hazard? I’d think twice before covering up a small hot lightbulb with a soft flammable plastic layer. Even if a LED isn’t that hot, remember that the light is on forever, 24/7, and if you tape it shut the generated heat has nowhere to go.
It’s funny, because until a few years ago, it was somehow impossible to make blue LEDs. All the gadget makers wanted blue lights (because blue = future), but there was no chemical they could use to produce a blue glow in an LED. Or maybe there was one, but it was much too expensive. The best anyone could do was take a white LED and tint the shell blue, and it didn’t work. The only options for manus were white, green, red, and orange. This ushered in the era of the Ubiquitous Green Light.
And then, someone came along and found a cheap way to make blue LEDs. Then there was a gold rush (or blue rush) for electronics makers to squeeze as many blue glowing lights onto their products as possible. Harsh, sharp, too-bright blue everywhere!
My DirecTV receiver has a ring of blue lights on the front, which can be pretty distracting when trying to watch TV. Happily, the makers were kind enough to have a “hidden” button combo that can dim these lights to 3 levels of brightness, or turn them off completely. Absolutely everything should have that feature.
Is there such a thing as tinted tape? (Keeping bright LEDs at bay)
Don’t overlook the possibilities of fingernail polish.
A coat or two of dark red will tame an overbright blue LED.
Scratch the polish with a pin to let just a little light through.
I suspect the real reason for the great demand for blue LEDs was that, once you had blue, you could create RGB displays that can mimic TVs and computer monitors on a large scale.
I have no idea. Ive been out of the printing biz for a decade and a half now, I was surprised the stuff is even made in this digital age.
It’s used to block the UV light used in exposing offset printing plates. Being a very dark red, I imagine it would darken the LED considerably, but to what color I don’t know.
But if cmyk is lurking about, perhaps they can give a better idea.
Almost.
White LEDs are made FROM blue LEDs.
Red LEDs were first, then Orange, Yellow and Green.
Since Blue LEDs took so long to make (30 years+ after the first Red LED), everyone wanted to use them in their products, because they were so new and cool. Now, they are everywhere.
