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Interesting article at Business Insider on why we don't like LED bulbs:
There's a handy trick for reading station signs that otherwise fly past in a blur as you travel in a high-speed train. Look at one side of the window and then immediately at the other side of the window. When you change your gaze, your eyes will automatically make a rapid jerking movement, known as a saccade. If the direction of the saccade is the same as that of the train, your eyes will freeze the image for a split second, long enough to read the station name if you time things right.
Saccades are very fast movements of the eyes. Their exact speed depends on the size of the movement, but large saccades can move the eyes at the same rate as a high-speed train. The image of the station name becomes visible because it is travelling at the same speed as the eye, and the images before and after the saccade are blurred and so don't interfere with the image of the sign. This shows us that our vision is still working when our eyes move rapidly during saccades.
Scientists used to think we could see no more than about 90 flashes of light a second but now we know it's more like 2,000 because the eyes move so rapidly when we change gaze from one point to another. During the eye movement, the flicker of light creates a pattern that we can see. And this has some surprising consequences for our health thanks to the way some types of lighting can affect us. In particular, it could discourage people from using more energy-saving LED lightbulbs.
Most lighting is electric and powered by an alternating current supply, which makes the bulbs continually dim and then brighten again at a very fast rate. Unlike filament lamps and to a lesser extent fluorescent lamps, LEDs don't just dim but effectively turn on and off completely (unless the current is maintained in some way).
The answer is not to make them less piercing?
(Score: 2) by rigrig on Saturday July 29 2017, @01:09PM (2 children)
That is for fluorescent lights: they aren't suited to run on DC, and used to just run to the AC frequency, but with modern ballasts they can run at those frequencies.
If you want (professional) flicker-free LED lighting you can get it: LEDs run fine on DC, so any decent rectifier will do the trick.
The problem is when you get a bunch of cheapest-to-manufacture-as-possible LED bulbs: skimping on the built-in rectifier will leave huge ripples in the DC, causing the flicker.
No one remembers the singer.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by zocalo on Saturday July 29 2017, @02:58PM (1 child)
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 3, Interesting) by RedBear on Monday July 31 2017, @03:24AM
By a strange coincidence I just now clicked on a YouTube video of a TEDx talk showing a perfect example of that phenomenon. The giant screen behind the speaker is going nuts in the video. Cascading blank lines and other weirdness. Sharp lines between different sections of the LED array.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6t6rn1a-t6E [youtube.com]
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ