- Joined
- Oct 29, 2012
- Messages
- 1,328
This is just my observation and I'm curious if anyone else has noticed that "bright" or "super bright" LEDs like those in cheap flashlights, cheap aftermarket LED headlights, and sometimes even just status LEDs on different circuit boards or appliances can be blinding to look at, while providing an unintuitively disappointing amount of illumination. I'm sure some of it has to do with the quality of the external optics associated with the LED (parabolic cone reflector in the case of flashlights and headlights) but I don't think that explains the whole phenomenon. If I take a LED and an incandescent bulb alone (no external optical devices to influence the result) that provide roughly equal illumination into a dark, both just bright enough to see where I'm going, the incandescent will be almost comfortable to look directly at, while the LED won't be. I don't think (not sure) that it has anything to do with wavelength either, because I have observed this with all kinds of LEDs. Red and cool white do seem the harshest to me, but even the warm white and other colors are just... unreasonably hard to look at.