Awful LED lights everywhere in USA...and upcoming incandescent ban!

ryans

I unfortunately had to visit a hospital, a hotel, and a funeral home recently. All of them had replaced (in the last few years since I've been there) with awful flickering LEDs! I had to leave after 15 minutes 🙁. The lack of regulation of LEDs is making it harder to live a normal life.

To make it worse, USA is banning halogen & incandescents by August. This seems to include rough service bulbs too:

DOE reaffirmed its conclusions in the January 2017 Definition Final Rules and discontinued the exemptions from the GSIL definition for rough service lamps; shatter-resistant lamps;

Any advice what I can do?

I've been:

Trying to buy as many incandescents as possible. But very hard to find; impossible to find my go-to brand. Even light fixtures/lamps are being made to only power LEDs (only have 7W instead of 45W, for example). Sigh, now need to buy extra lamps.
Commented on the DOE rule.
Commented for the FDA to regular LEDs.
Signed the Reverse Incandescent Ban petition
Also, Jen's advice on reporting health problems caused by LEDs to the FDA is good

I fear there will be a time when flickering LEDs will be completely unavoidable and it is very frustrating. How are other people dealing with this crap?

Storme

ryans

Here's the thing, you can read this article which details the ban on incandescent bulbs. In fact more and more countries are starting to ban incandescent bulbs and the era of LED lighting is coming.

https://www.shinelongled.com/incandescent-ban/

Nomorebrightlights

ryans
I know this is not a great or inexpensive solution, nor does it effectively combat the onslaught of flickering motion on our eyes, but from personal experience, wearing glasses has been my shield of safety while going out and about in the LED wilderness.

I am not affiliated with them in any way, but Avulux is my #1 brand of choice, the only brand I will use from now on, and I've tried several kinds of glasses over the last ten years. These glasses block 97% of light-wavelengths that have been researched extensively to cause migraines in other people with light sensitivities, including LEDs. They really are effective if you can afford them (over $300, sadly, but good quality products that actually work cost money nowadays).

I'm also using the anti-glare lens for the first time, since they had a sale on Black Friday for them, and I recommend those as well. But even without that special coating lens, it makes a HUGE difference for me being around LED lighting, along with other problematic lights, like neon or flourescent lights. They go from being completely intolerable to actually manageable for a while.

I might even have a coupon code still, but it's likely expired by now. Still, I recommend getting some quality glasses that don't just block blue light, but all of the problematic wavelengths that LEDs pulsate out unapologetically. If you are strapped for cash, though, then even getting some effective blue-blocker glasses (key word being effective) can definitely help with the strain. Those and hats and direct avoidance of staring into them…

As for biohacking indoors, you've got the right idea.

beyondthelight

ryans By the way, this thread should be renamed to "Awful LED lights everywhere in USA...but upcoming incandescent comeback!

they are now going to be allowed in the USA!!

Tobiyas

I am already living in this inevitable "future" that you speak of.

https://blog.nus.edu.sg/jeremiahchan/2020/10/12/singapores-lighting-and-its-effects-on-our-health/

In this city, ranked with the highest light pollution in the world, has already been completely replaced islandwide with the following led specs:

Extremely bright light of over 1500nits
7500kelvin
PWM 200 hertz with 99% modulation / 2000 hertz but with even higher brightness intensity

They can be found in everywhere with every 3 - 6 feets (or 1 - 2 meters), across the entire city. Streets, shopping malls, subways, stations, you name it. During the covid lockdown they took the opportunity to renovate ceiling lamps to leds. They even put neon signs and digital bill boards with the above led specs everywhere as well. I have to wear sun hat indoor as their ceiling is typically only 2.5 meters low and I stand at around 1.9m. Therefore, the led is right in my central vision, and only around half a meter from my head.

To cope with this,I have to wear shades (to cut down on the glare and brightness intensity) and 98% blue light fitover glasses(to reduce my sensitivity to flickering) wherever I go outside.

Occasionally, I could even see the led light source flickering in my peripheral vision. That's because while their switch to cheap LED have increased brightness by 2-3 times, they kept the PWM hertz low and modulation high to reduce overall electrical energy consumption. Being able to percieve brighter light flickering in the peripheral vision is due to critical flicker frequency.

Yea, that's just how bad and awful it is. It's inevitable.

KM

I can't deal with this. There are places I shouldn't go or I'd have to suffer the consequences (headaches, unable to focus, sick the whole next day etc.). I can't change store lighting or other people's home lighting, so there's no strategy other than avoiding such places. Which increase in number lately: many stores and even street corners are putting up LCD panel advertising with no way to avoid, as symptoms are triggered by having something flicker in the peripheral sight. The wonderful sodium-vapor street lamps are slowly being replaced with LED. There are now streets in the neighborhood I can't walk at evening/night because their lighting instantly triggers symptoms that last for hours. It's only getting worse at this rate.

Tobiyas

KM I can't change store lighting or other people's home lighting, so there's no strategy other than avoiding such places.

Hahaha exactly that’s the typical response I get from people when I brought up my struggles in my everyday life. “Just change the lighting”. Like how can i change others’ store lighting or houses?

The installation of led everywhere is really getting quite ridiculous imo. At least in my city, they even installed a huge 50inch lcd right in the bus. I don’t know if this was specially installed by the transport service provider here or was it shipped with one. This caused me serious inconvenience anyway for I have to restrict myself to standing at the entrance of the bus, where I will be behind the LCD screen. The awkwardness of standing at the bus entrance during rush hours.

Now because of all the cheap leds, I cant be out after sun set because of all the temporal light modulation.

I sure hope some kind of strict regulation will be enforced worldwide. No invisible flickering should be allowed.

ryans

KM What do we do? Move to some rural area?

ryans

According to Ban Blinding LEDs FB Group, nearly all incandescent and halogens will be banned this August in USA, including rough service. However, there is an exception for appliance lightbulbs of a max of 40W, typically 400 lumens.

Sad times.

Sunspark

You can probably still order them from Canada, Mexico and China.

ryans

It's August 1 . Incandescent / halogen are no longer available in USA 🙁.

Sunspark

ryans Crap, and I meant to order up a bunch. Is it really a hard stop? Before in Canada they just did a "stores can keep selling their stock on shelf until it's gone".. so the US has to chuck everything in the trash?

ryans

Sunspark Unfortunately I think yes, they are being chucked in the trash. A search on Amazon shows some 3P merchants selling them, maybe they don't know or care.

Appliance incandescent seem to still be available: https://www.acehardware.com/departments/lighting-and-electrical/light-bulbs/incandescent-bulbs/3005434. They should work in a normal lamp, with no big downsides to my knowledge.

MysticMedusa

Unfortunately it is very similar in Australia, with potentially catastrophic results for nocturnal insects and stargazers as well. This is not to trivialize the issue for people - but these insects and some plants are vital for ecological balance and the "skylore" is part of our heritage, the lights block out the stars.

I came on here as I have to upgrade computers -am working on an ancient iMac after I had to sell a brand new iMac due to (evidently) vestibular migraines - hoping to find a recommendation for a usable one. Apple the company was absolutely useless when I sought information and insist on acting as if this is an isolated condition, that I was the first person/logged support reach-out mentioning the issue.

beyondthelight

There is still a solution for us that really are suffering from the LED lights and use a computer a lot, a company that makes incandescent monitors, spectrumview.com

jordan

beyondthelight woah that's super cool. I wonder if their panels they use are true 8 bit and not 6+2frc. Also regarding the bulb ban, WinCo food store still seems to sell the banned bulbs. I have a stock pile of the bulbs I bought from them.

DisplaysShouldNotBeTVs

beyondthelight Woah. This is one of the coolest looking sites I've seen in years, not joking. So much of this is basically my aesthetic too ahahahaha ꩜꩜꩜ like shockingly close, can't believe I didn't hear about this till now. This is the branding the Daylight folks wish they could have had💀

The price for the smallest + incandescent included model is super attractive compared to all the other competing sunlit RLCD monitors, if this is not a scam that is…

a 100 CRI monitor with basically the highest gamut coverage achieved yet is something that even the wider display community who doesn't care about strain would stlll care a LOT about. Especially because of the potential for wide appeal anyway, I'll wait to see more coverage on this before I can believe it's legit. I'm not much of a crypto fan so I always will be a bit skeptical whenever that's involved, even though anonymous payments is arguably a valid use.

Looks like it used to be called SolarBacklight before now? Both web domains have the same content (although the font is different).

Open source guide (as mentioned at the end) has such huge potential too. Always great to see this — of course doesn't neccessarily mean much yet until it actually happens though.

(and is satisfying for me to finally see alternate ways of doing this being thought of, as so far all of the methods to achieve wider color gamuts have just been brighter and harsher backlights over and over.

There is still the issue of someone who designs content for this monitor either "requiring" dithering or just having a ton of banding though if they want to gamut map sRGB to it's usual less saturated color space. Much more "true bit depth" than just 8 or 10 would be needed to both keep sRGB at its usual saturation level but allow for higher gamut content as well without any banding or dithering)

No FRC really does 100% matter, for example ONYX BOOX is naturally lit but still uses spatiotemporal dithering to display grayscale in fast mode. It "freezes" when still which is nice and only moves when animations or scrolling is happening. But it remains true that during any movement, the dithering noise will move all over the place to random positions constantly and still causes strain and annoyance for me, even if the backlight is off.

Are you affilated or friends/online friends with them? Given that this is your first post here and your name / pfp seems roughly in line with their branding. Or did the university professor reccomend it to you? In that case are they friends with them?

If it's none of those, how did you find out about it? There's nothing on Google aside from the website itself, and even that hasn't surfaced that high up in results yet

beyondthelight Color depth is as good as it gets

What you are referring to is NOT color depth, this is color gamut. Depth means how many in-between shades or "precision" you can have within a gamut — for example 100% sRGB panels each at 6, 8, or 10 bits will all have the same saturation level if they are told to display RGB 100%,0,0, a properly sRGB calibrated screen reading "100% red" will generate a specific shade and saturation of red.

What changes with depth is not saturation but how many steps are in-between 0 and 100% (where 100% still refers to the same maximum saturation of a gamut). 8-bit means this scale is the common 0-255. 10-bit uses 0-1023 instead. Both will take 255 or 1023 respectively to mean "100% of whatever the native gamut they're built to support and 'max out at' is".

However, the gamut coverage of this display is very groundbreaking if true.

(In fact, as I mentioned earlier, if you want to "accurately" display sRGB gamut content on this display in its usual desaturated form there would only be a very narrow range of e.g. 8-bit to actually represent that —

because, if this display is 8-bit but has such a unconventionally wide native gamut, 255 will mean something more like "100 CRI INCANDESCENT 2004 SPIRAL DREAM RED" and not sRGB red😂

So either everything is oversaturated [which in this rare case, actually is a positive and actually has the potential to heal instead of hurt because of such a nice lighting method, basically a selling point of this display]…

But if you trying to get color "accuracy" for existing content on this display [which has never been done with such a wide gamut before], there's either LOTS of banding, which I am actually fine with and MUCH prefer instead of dithering FWIW! — or dithering has to be used)

Finally, nothing comes up for the US patent? Am I searching for it wrong on USPTO or does it just not exist (yet)?

beyondthelight

jordan I dont know about the bits but they have by far the best colors I have ever seen in a monitor, really, not even a match with the expensive mac cinema displays, its the incandescent backlight, its another realm altogether.

jordan

beyondthelight can you post some photos of yours? Is there way to contact them? I didn't see an email on their website

beyondthelight

jordan Not sure how to take the photo as the light you will see will still be luminescent, but using as daylight backlighted in front of my window, hooked up to my macbook laptop, with its screen permanently turned off.

beyondthelight

jordan Reds are especially rich, the laptop screen colors are much pale in comparison, and besides color, the strain totally vanishes, you can look at the monitor all day and have zero strain.

jordan

beyondthelight Thanks for the pics. How does the back of it look? I would try it if I was able to contact them first and ask about if it uses frc or not. You can have a super safe backlight but it can still cause bad issues if the panel itself uses frc or even vcom.

beyondthelight

jordan back has a milky white glass, have it permanently fixed in my window so cant really take photos of the back, it lets the light coming from the back thru. I would not worry about the frc and those details, the important thing is that it works, and works like a miracle.

DisplaysShouldNotBeTVs

jordan BTW, they just added a contact form to the bottom of their site!

I also finally found the Spectrumview patent:

https://ppubs.uspto.gov/dirsearch-public/print/downloadPdf/11415835

https://patents.google.com/patent/US11415835B2/en

Interesting that it's been in development all the way since 2019

Seems similar to Eazeye at the surface, but what really intrigues me is how Spectrumview is claiming to offer such wide gamut coverage and seemingly brighter results even with just sunlight, compared to the typical washed out look that other RLCDs have

jordan

beyondthelight unfortunately FRC is a huge part to this eye strain issue, you can't ignore it if your sensitive to it (I am). That's why people still had issues with the eazeye monitor which uses natural light, it ended up using 6+2frc. You can get rid of flickering backlights but the frc will still rapidly flicker the pixels. If I knew the model number of the panel in this monitor I could figure out if it uses it or not. How did you find out about this monitor btw? I couldn't find anything about it online, only the link you posted here. Definitely interested with the incandescent light box but I don't think anyone else even would buy it without knowing the panels native color depth.

beyondthelight

jordan Perhaps different people are affected by different things, for me its the light. Color depth is as good as it gets, have a friend, a university professor of mathematics that has the incandescent bulb one and said that he could not believe how vivid the colors are, he spends much of his time in front of a computer as well and his eye and mental strain also vanished. And it makes sense, your primary interface between you and the monitor is light, if you have quality light/photons you have a quality experience. I have been searching for alternatives for many years, first i thought it was display quality, so started getting expensive displays, with no pwm or flicker or blue light, but still didnt make a lot of difference.