Blinded By The Light
I'm running late tonight, so it's another 'photograph a near object' moment. In this case it's a Christmas present. This little black box is an HDMI to analogue VGA convertor, but that's not the point. The point is the dazzling light from the feckin' huge LED on it.
Interestingly, a quick web search shows that this is a serious and increasingly recognised problem.
Blue LEDs were very hard to make, and so they were expensive. This meant that if somebody wanted to make their stuff look expensive and exclusive they put blue LEDs on them.
Now they've got affordable and they've filtered through to the Chinese market so they're absolutely everywhere. And they're always too bright.
The reasons are partly physiological. We're not good at focusing on blue light, so we get big halo effects that make the lights seem bigger than they are. There's also a recognised phenomenon called 'blue light hazard' which is to do with the increased sensitivity to blue that we have, and that our eyes don't shut it out when they should and this can cause lasting damage. There are safety guidelines and regulations about it, but these are for dealing with really bright sources. Some people feel that LEDs are now reaching a brightness where they are starting to enter this territory. Ooh.
What I do know is that Laura has a DVD recorder that gets covered with a piece of card at night so that she can actually sleep. And I know where she's coming from.
So there we go, blue LEDs have their amazing uses (giant video screens anyone?) but not on domestic appliances!. Original public domain image from Flickr