LED Christmas lights which don't hurt the eyes: it finally happened!
As we reach the end of this year’s No Effort November, it’s time once again for me to embark on my silly quest to make LED Christmas lights suck less. If you’re new to this tradition, for the past seven years I have been making the same stupid yearly video where I attempt to both explain what irritates me about today’s Christmas lights and where I attempt my own fixes to make modern, energy-efficient LED technology look just like the Christmas lights of my youth. ♫ Hallelujah from Handel's Messiah starts ♫ And guess what? This year, I didn’t have to do a thing! That’s right, it finally happened! You see those beautiful red, yellow, blue, and green incandescent mini-lights behind me? Yeah, well, it turns out the ones on the left side of the screen aren’t incandescent at all! They’re Vintaglos, a line of LED Christmas lights from the Seasons Reflection Company which are exactly, to a T, the thing I have been trying to make this whole time! I was able to just buy my way out of this nonsense and I couldn’t be happier! Now, this video is going to be much more than a simple celebration of the fact that someone finally understood the assignment but before we get any further, it is important to me that you know I bought these with my own money and I have absolutely no relationship with this company. I found out about these through my friend Dan and immediately ordered some to see if they were as good as they looked. And they were, so I immediately ordered much more.
These are not cheap: these are $25 per set of 100 (though at the time of video release they are currently on sale for $20 per set if ordered via their website) and they aren’t perfect. They’re extremely close to perfect, so my complaints are just nitpicks, but I will go over them in the spirit of fair product reviews. Before we get there, though, I want to back up and explain the problem that these have mercifully fixed once more. Because, well, I’ve not done a very great job of that in years past which I can tell because of how excited people got to share these with me. Yes, the Midwest's own Menards has come out with a line of supposedly vintage LED Christmas lights which, at a glance, sure do look like the sort of thing I’ve been asking for. They have deeply-colored caps - I think they’re even glass - which look awfully close to this incandescent set, and aside from the inclusion of purple which I’m not thrilled by, this looks promising.
Until you plug them in and... that happens. Yes, the diodes under those caps are color-matched to the cap. And that means the actual color produced by these lights is coming from the LEDs themselves which emit monochromatic light of a single wavelength. That spectral color is just plain ugly and way too harsh, especially the greens and the blues.
This is not what Christmas looks like, this is what a vape shop looks like. Or worse, a gaming PC. That was a joke, please don’t come after me. What do I mean by monochromatic light and color-matched diodes? Well, okay, I don’t want to go too deeply down the rabbit hole of human vision and color theory yet again but the visible spectrum of light is simply electromagnetic radiation that our peepers happen to be able to detect, wavelengths between 750 and roughly 400 nanometers.
Each of the individual wavelengths along that range is interpreted by our eyes and brains as a color. It’s literally the rainbow: that visual phenomenon allows us to see the entire visible light spectrum from the reds on the long end to the violets on the short end and everything in-between. There was also a Pink Floyd album about it or something. White light, the kind of light the sun makes as well as pretty much every kind of general illumination technology we’ve ever had (with a few noticeable exceptions) is a big ol’ mess of all those wavelengths, or at least a combination of wavelengths that activates the color-detecting cones cells in our eyes roughly equally. If those cone cells are all activated together, our brain interprets that as colorless, white light. But when that white light lands on colored objects, those objects will absorb some wavelengths more than others, so the wavelengths that get reflected back to our eyes are a little different and they activate our cone cells in a different ratio which we interpret as a color.
But light which appears colored due to reflecting off of something is very different from a light source which itself is colored. Before the LED came along and both made everything better and screwed everything up, when we wanted a light source to be a particular color we had to start with white light and then filter out the wavelengths we don’t want. That’s what’s going on with this set of Christmas lights: these are the same exact incandescent filaments as these, producing a full-spectrum white light, but before that light exits the glass it goes through a color filter which only lets some wavelengths through. Now, here’s the key thing: This filtering is not perfect. The green filter, for example, doesn’t let a single wavelength of green light through, it lets a cluster of wavelengths in the region of green through.
And that means this green is not a pure spectral color - it’s awfully green, to be sure, but notice that when I get up real close and look at the filament directly, the actual hot glowing filament producing the light looks… more of a lime green than an emerald green. It looks that way because we’re looking at the very brightest spot and that imperfection in the color filtering becomes more noticeable. If I unfocus the camera's lens so we’re not able to see the filament, the green appears much more intense and really does look like an emerald green but it’s still not a spectral color. Light-emitting diodes, on the other hand, well they do emit spectral colors.
LEDs emit light of a single wavelength. Just one. So whatever wavelength of “green” is being emitted by a green LED is the one and only color of light it will ever appear to be.
And in this light set, those are green LEDs. Yes, they have a dark green color filter over them, but that filter isn’t doing anything! There’s a single wavelength of light being emitted by the diode, so that filter literally cannot change the appearance of the light that makes it through. It might reduce the output a little bit, but it’s going to look the same exact piercing green no matter what. That is why these LED light sets look so stinking harsh. They are a cluster of colors which are literally as intense as they can possibly appear to our eyes, and while some of you may like that, I really don’t. Especially when it comes to blue: incandescent light sets have pretty dull blues because incandescent filaments don’t produce that much light on the shorter end of the visible light spectrum.
So when you’re filtering out all the long wavelengths (the reds, oranges, yellows and greens), you just don’t have that much light output left. It’s still a very pretty and intense blue color, but it’s not overwhelming the rest of the colors at all like it is here. And the greens in an LED light set are almost always just as bad to my eyes. The wildest thing to me about this problem is that it’s trivially easy to fix! White LEDs have been a thing for a long time now, and they just keep getting better and better every year.
These days we have LED lighting which is virtually indistinguishable from incandescent lighting, made possible by complex phosphor coatings which shift blue and near-UV wavelengths emitted by the diodes down to all the other wavelengths of light we need to produce what looks like white light. And what I’ve been doing these past seven years is buying white LED Christmas light sets and painting them with various colored stuffs to demonstrate that that is, in fact, a thing which could be done! I found it kind of baffling that nobody else had had this thought. Why not just make Christmas lights exactly like we always used to do before LEDs were a thing but swap the incandescent filaments for a nice, warm-white light-emitting diode? Then we could have the best of both worlds! Luckily, a few years ago Tru-Tone started up and did exactly that. Tru-Tone makes incredible C7 and C9 Christmas lights which I’ve talked about before. These are made exactly like the incandescent bulbs of the past but rather than have a tungsten filament generating the light, they have a warm white LED faux-filament inside. And they’re amazing! They are essentially perfect, the only thing that gives them away as LED is the fact that they are actually flashing 120 times per second with the incoming AC power, but unless you’re very sensitive to that you probably won’t notice unless you move your eyes really quickly while staring at them.
Now, because this idea is so obvious, for better and worse Tru-Tone is starting to get imitators. Menards, as a matter of fact, is now selling ceramic multicolored C7 and C9 light sets which are just about as good. However, Tru-Tone is still the only place that I know of to get these transparent colored C-style bulbs - this is what Menards is selling and… yeah it’s awful. Those are colored diodes under the glass and they shoot into the eyes like laser beams. But, personally, I don’t use these big lights very much or at all. I’ve always been a mini-light person - I just prefer the way they look in most applications and that’s what I grew up with.
Tru-Tone doesn’t make any of these, and nobody else has understood the assignment quite correctly. Lots of retailers are selling things now which are vintage-ish, and for what it’s worth I actually do kind of like this new implementation where a tiny diode under a resin blob is sticking up into the envelope - that mimics the look of a filament pretty well. However, that’s nowhere near as important to me as the color accuracy and so I’ve just been patiently experimenting with ways to hand-color these LED lights to figure out a half-decent way to get what I want.
Over the years I’ve tried sharpies, I’ve tried nail polish, I’ve tried spray paint, craft paint, transparent craft paint, dyed resin, literal dye like for clothing, and other things I’m sure I’ve forgotten and while most of them worked to various extents, they were either extremely annoying to apply or had some sort of flaw which annoyed me. The best option so far has been transparent modelling paint applied with an airbrush. I let this light set stay out all summer and, surprisingly, the colors haven’t really faded at all. Uh, half the set doesn't work cuz a wire broke but the colors haven't faded at all so if worse comes to worst there’s always this option. But this year, oh this year, I have finally found the holy grail. Someone who bothered to do this at the time of manufacturing and pulled the strings to put a product called Vintaglo into the world.
And they really went above and beyond. First, let’s ignore this multicolored set and instead look at this white set. This is, without a doubt, the best-looking set of white miniature Christmas lights I have ever seen. Most white LED sets have diodes which can best be described as… cheap. They’re often not unpleasant to look at - I have seen some fairly nice golden-white colors over the years. But the quality of the light that they cast is… pretty craptastic.
If you were to illuminate a room using a typical set of white LED Christmas lights, well it would look very wrong. The color rendering index on those LEDs is poop. These, though, these are warm-white diodes that you could light a room with and actually be happy. The light they cast on objects looks perfectly normal. This is so close to what an actual incandescent light sets look like that I have exactly zero complaints. The only thing I could possibly wish for was some smoothing so these weren’t strobing at 120 Hz, which I can notice.
However the fact that these actually are full-wave rectified is itself a huge and rather uncommon bonus. A lot of AC-powered light sets like this are only half-wave rectified which means they flash at only 60 Hz which is super noticeable. These appear to be burning quite steadily and it’s hard to notice the strobing at all.
Great stuff. A base of actually-good warm-white diodes laid the groundwork for the thing I’ve been hoping for years someone would finally just do: put those same warm white diodes under intensely-colored plastic caps so we can have a multicolored light set which actually looks warm and festive rather than laserbeamy and technodystopian. And that’s exactly what these are.
And in my preferred color scheme, too! I don’t care for pinks, teals, or oranges in my Christmas lights, and I cherish the way the yellow pops out against the other colors. I have always felt this combination looks nicest, especially at a distance since you can still make out different colors. When yellow is swapped for orange or amber, at a distance that combination looks like a dull orangey-red mess to me, and when there’s another warm color in there like pink or magenta, I find it really hard to pick out the green and blue at all.
But anyway, pedantic color preferences aside this is as close to perfect as I could reasonably expect. Next to a real incandescent light set with the same color scheme, they're nearly indistinguishable! The green is slightly desaturated on the Vintaglo set and the yellow itself has just a tinge of green in it - I think I know why and I’ll explain that later - but honestly that’s just nitpicking. I’ve decorated with a whole bunch of these light sets and oh boy it’s hitting me right in the childhood. I could not be happier. And the sets have some other quality-of-life improvements, too.
Out of the box the wires are remarkably flexible. Usually when you get a new set of lights like this you have to really stretch it out to keep it from accordioning back on itself but these hardly need that at all. Which says to me the wire and insulation was specced really well. The overall quality of the lamp holders and plugs is really top-notch, but I will grant that's not saying that much - these are the same basic things in every set of lights but they’re at least among the best of the same basic things I’ve seen.
So what are my complaints? Well, I have two: one of which is technical, the other has to do with quality control. I’ll start with QC - a couple of the sets that I bought have a few blue lights which didn’t seem to get a very strong coating of color on the cap. Which was a bummer for two reasons: one, I was really hoping the plastic itself would be colored that way the coloring was throughout the plastic and it was less likely to fade with time and sun exposure. It does appear to be just a coating, though it may very well hold up much better than the coloring on glass incandescent sets so perhaps I have no reason to be bummed about that at all. But besides potential longevity issues, the mere fact that a few of the lights have inconsistent coloring is… disappointing.
Not a huge deal at all, but a little disappointing. The second complaint is technical and one that will probably be pretty hard to fix. While these warm-white LEDs are fantastic, there’s no way that they’re actually producing the same full-spectrum output that a glowing incandescent filament does.
I’m much too lazy to get my hands on a spectroscope to show you this but white LEDs actually have fairly spiky spectral emissions which our eyes almost never notice - they’re tuned really well these days and you have to have a really good sense of color rendering to ever notice that but… in this case, because we’re using a color filter on a light source which has somewhat spiky spectral output, the color filtering doesn’t behave exactly the same way as it does with an incandescent filament. Now, before you think this is a big deal, let me be clear that it’s absolutely not. The effect of this is miniscule but it’s probably why I’m seeing a teeny bit of a green tinge coming from the yellow lights.
To make yellow light from a white light source you really just have to filter out blue and violet wavelengths and you can let the rest through. To our eyes a combination of red and green wavelengths looks like yellow - that’s how your screen is making this yellow right now. It’s just red and green subpixels lighting up together. But this filter over an LED isn’t going to let a huge collection of wavelengths starting at green and ending at red through, it’s letting… whatever spiky emissions from the white diode are shorter than blue, and if the green is a little strong compared to, say, orangey wavelengths, well you’re gonna be able to see it. And I can.
In an actual display of lights this is practically irrelevant. When I look at the decorations I’ve put up, I can’t notice this at all. They look exactly like I want them to look. However, where it is more noticeable is in the overall glow that the light sets as a whole produce. Again, this is super nitpicky stuff, but if I have an incandescent set of these multicolored lights up in my window, then at night they produce a very warm, pleasant glow in the room itself. These don’t quite do that.
It’s not bad by any means, but it's not the same. It’s a little too green and a little too… artificial, I think that’s the best word to use. But in all reality, that’s a tiny, tiny complaint. When you’re actually looking at the lights themselves, you’d be hard pressed to know these are LEDs unless you get up close enough to actually see the tiny little diode chilling at the base of the cap. And that is, in a word, fantasicawesomazing. I am so thrilled that these exist and I really, really hope this continues to be a thing.
There are so many advantages to LED Christmas light sets - obviously they use hardly any power at all, we’re talking about 5 watts per set of 100 rather than 40. And that means you can connect dozens of these light sets end to end (Vintaglo claims 48) rather than just three or four. And of course they should last much, much longer (at least if handled carefully and removed and stored promptly) since they’re not incandescent and they won’t start burning out by the end of the second year. Yet until this year, I have never found a set of multicolored LED mini lights that I could tolerate. They have always been… that. I strongly dislike that.
There have been a few sets which I can stomach a little better - a few years ago Walmart had some which actually had far fewer blue LEDs than any other color which really tamed things, and they did have yellow. In fact that yellow was made by using a white LED under a yellow cap, and that’s really good because prior to that the actually-yellow LEDs which were used in multicolored sets were extremely dull compared to the rest. At least the yellow is actually bright now - and this is actually repeated in these Menards so-called-vintage lights. Which is both great and infuriating because it means whoever is in charge of the larger Christmas light industry seems to understand the value of putting a warm white LED under a colored cap but for some reason has decided yellow is the only color they’re gonna do that for.
The red is still pure red, the green and blue are still pure and disgusting green and blue, and in this set the purple... honestly I’m wondering if that’s a UV diode. It excited the phosphorescent print on that clock back there so it’s definitely violet if not UV. But anyway, at long last the folks behind Vintaglo have actually done it. And for that, I am very grateful. There is, of course, a link in the description to the product page for these if you wish to order some and I really, really hope that they’ll be taking pre-orders if and when they sell out of this year’s inventory.
It’s possible that they may offer more color combinations in the future besides this objectively best one... though I understand some people disagree with me. I've also included a link to Tru-Tone in the spirit of supporting small, independent businesses and I wish them continued success as well. OK, well. Uh, that’s it. Both for this video and for No Effort November.
And, y'know, this might very well be the last time I have to make this video. Clearly there is a strong yearning for vintage-looking yet modern-tech Christmas lights - lots of big box stores are starting to sell variations on the vintage theme. But so far they really just haven’t gotten it! At all! [tumbling boxes] It takes a special kind of nerd to insist on the correct diodes driven the correct way placed under the correctly-colored caps using the correct manufacturing procedures and so far I know of only two small companies who have such a dedicated nerd in their ranks. But I’m so glad they exist and that they actually got it done.
Happy holidays to everyone out there, and may your festive displays glow with the cozy, welcoming warmth the season deserves. ♫ we-wish-you-a-merry-christmasedly smooth jazz ♫ Sorry, no bloopers this time. There were only two and I didn’t feel they’d be worth it. I mean, neither was great and then it would just be silly to have two and be like “yucks, no more bloopers” so you just get this explanation instead! Oh and some pretty lights. Those are incandescent twinkling lights which will be really hard to replicate well with LEDs.
But hopefully somebody's gonna try!
2024-12-05 20:01
