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All lighting that you have control over is technically articificial. All lighting, fundamentally, operates via the same mechanism: emission of photons. Spectrum matters, yes, but this only matters, IMO, at certain times. Blue light at the wrong times is almost certainly bad. I also suspect the same for red, but can't provide evidence for that.

All of these articles I've seen you link to are just flat put wrong about one thing or another. There are flicker free LED lighting solutions. How do I know? I've designed a basic current-limiting circuit when I was dabbling in building my own desk lamp with atypical photography grade LED chips. The output of the circuit was exceptionally steady and to all ways that I could measure.

Any LED light that flickers at the mains frequency is just doing the same thing as an incandescent bulb. The thermal inertia provided by the usually tungsten alloy element tends to smooth this out, the EXACT same way as a capacitor in an LED driver circuit. Since the components of an LED have less emmisive inertia, the change in current supplied to them and the dropoff in light output is much fasters than a hot wire of tungsten in a nearly perfect insulating environment.

Now, I DO have issues with some LED drivers. There are some really awful repurposed circuits that are emitting a heck of a lot of junk EMF. This IS NOT an issue with the LED itself. If you want to specify that spurious emissions well outside the visible light spectrum are an issue, I'm inclined to agree based on a very wide variety of anecdotal evidence and some more rigorous study into that particular matter.

LED lighting is much more complex than burning stuff or heating up a wire. It has many advantages over other lighting sources,especially with regards to light vs. heat output. Junk drivers are awful visually and possibly harmful other ways, but that's the same for nearly any junk switch mode power supply. Filtering out the exaggerated blue spectrum from LEDs is also an active area of R&D and it will continue to get better.

Mostly, I just think your understanding is limited, your interactions are very biased, and you seem extraordinarily closed off to basic facts. I do wish you'd look at things from a broader perspective. It's usually myopic to completely dismiss new technology as outright bad. It's also hypocritical to even have this argument since unless you have an old school CRT monitor to display all of this, you are still using LEDs to interact with the world. If LEDs are THAT bad for you, then I politely suggest you just stop using the internet altogether. Oh! But that would dampen your ability to interact and generate sales. Heh. Just something else to think about.

Leathermint 2mo ago

😂 you guys are so mad about this write up it's wild. Calling it biased pseudoscience against LED?? You guys realize this is just an objective write up explaining how LED works ON THE WEBSITE OF AN LED MANUFACTURER? Right? There's probably no one less biased against LED but the ones selling them at scale.

With that said, if you don't like this LED manufacturer, there are so many sources out there explaining that they flicker and it is basically physically impossible to fully prevent it. Look, maybe you invented a revolutionary LED in your garage but this is clearly not what 99.9% of them are made like.

Yes, on paper the heat wire act similarly as the capacitor. But it is not the same and the results are not the same.

None of this above is controversial. LED flicker is a problem we are actively fighting against because of health concerns even at high frequency while no one is trying to fight against incandescent flicker because it's basically non existent. It doesn't flick it dimmers.

When it comes to the blue light they emit, you say yourself that there's R&D going on. That's great. But, again, there's a problem here that you are fighting against that simply isn't present in heat source lights. You are trying to engineer this light to be healthier and that's great but it goes to show they start with a problem.

You say blue light is a problem but only at certain times of the day, I disagree that it is that simple but here I do not argue about this here. My point will simply remain that with incandescent one does not have to wonder if it is the right time of the day to use this or that light.

You tell me to "get off the Internet" because my computer use LED. I have said multiple time that LED is great light to work. I love to work with a bright white light. That doesn't mean it is good for me. I don't believe it's good to look at a screen 24/7 either. There is a bunch of things adult can realize aren't great for health but still use for this or that reason. You could say it's about opportunity cost analysis. Do you think I would mandate incandescent lighting in operating rooms at the hospital if I was king?

Incandescent are better light for day to day living. If this statement makes you mad, look within.

Now, if you could point me towards the hard facts you claim I chose to ignore because I am a closed off retard I would appreciate.

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Discussion

The Beave 2mo ago

I don't think I've mentioned word pseudoscience.

The article you presented is factually incorrect. There is a very easy way too ensure that LEDs don't flicker: feed them a steady DC current. For example, if you have a regular AA battery and an LED of the appropriate design, you can simply connect the legs of the LED directly to the battery and you'll have a steady, flicker free light until the battery dies.

The issue you bring up and that you don't seem to understand is that rectifying AC to DC often doesn't leave a smooth level of current moving through a circuit. If you string enough individual LED chips together, you can simply wire the LEDs into am AC current circuit and you'll get light, but, it will obviously flicker at the cyclic rate that is being fed to them. In the US, this is 60Hz, and most of the rest of the world that is 50Hz. In fact, many newer, cheaper, simpler LED lightbulbs do this, especially the "filament style" bulbs. There are some drawbacks to this design: if the voltage goes out of range (either from a brownout or a voltage spike), the chips can let out the magic smoke, so these tend to not be as reliable as bulbs that are fed steady DC or have a good AC rectification circuit.

That brings us to the subject of AC rectification. This is a fairly huge topic, as nearly every piece of electronic equipment today is, as some point, powered from an AC system. So, unless you are going through the trouble of running your whole life on strictly DC that you generate via atypical means, plus you have no exposure to WiFi, radio waves, sunlight, infrared, etc., you are being exposed to oscillating waves of all sorts. To state for the record, I do think that various frequencies applied in specific ways are, in fact, intentionally being used to manipulate and directly harm us humans. That's out of the scope of this discussion. I will be limiting my part of this discussion to hopefully helping you understand why I think you're too worried about the flicker and also helping you understand that it can and is easily eliminated at the point of use, which is why (again, putting aside the spectrum emitted) LEDs CAN be perfectly safe, and in many cases preferable to incandescent lighting.

For the sake of this discussion, let's put aside cheap, junky stuff. Ok? Cheap LED lighting systems are very likely problematic in that they likely do emit unwanted EMF from the power supplies that rectify AC to DC to power the LEDs. Eliminating the cheapest, awfullest stuff, we are left with quality electronics.

If what the author of that article is saying is correct, that would mean that absolutely NONE of your electronics that use would be reliable. None. Point blank. Full stop. Period. Anything with any sort of processor would die nearly instantly if the processor did not get steady, clean DC power. Since this is case, that means that power supplies that can take the AC power from the grid and rectify it to steady, clean DC power not only exist, but they are so common these days no one gives them a second thought. Any appliance that isn't just a very simple physically switched motor needs DC to function, and this has been known stove the very beginning of electrification. (I'm sure you are aware of the AC vs. DC war between Tesla and Edison.) The means to rectify AC to DC and then invert DC to DC has been known for obey a century at this point, though we do now have more compact and much more efficient means to accomplish both conversions.

The most common DC power supply these days is a switch mode topology. You can read up on how those work if you like, as I don't exactly want to type that out here since I'm on my phone and enjoying a fire in the wood stove. My point in bringing these up, though, is that they are capable of producing very stable DC given a bewilderingly wide set of inputs. (Anything that can operate "worldwide," as an example.) Now... If the author of the article can't source, design, or build a DC power supply that can handle normal grid variation to supply a VERY simple load (driving an LED is nearly as simple as a resistive load), then I will say that he is ignorant or incompetent. Saying it is impossible to prevent flicker of an LED lighting element is just daft. I can say this because *I* have managed it just hacking at circuit design with some of the cheapest parts I can source on Amazon and a few electronics suppliers. If I can manage that, an EE (or someone who takes electronicsas a hobby much more seriously than I) should be able to do it better, cheaper, and simpler than I can.

So... To sum up: good LED light sources do not flicker. At all. By any definition. Granted, a good light source won't be cheap. I know you're not into cheap since you have shown a propensity to quality that is admirable. But... I just don't think you've got a clue about the underlying tech in this stuff.

Now I'd like to bring up another aspect of this whole complex topic: dimming and PWM for other purposes.

Most LED lighting systems that are dimmable use Pulse Width Modulation to achieve a lower light output. This is a cheap and easy way to do so. The power supply emits pulses of current of various durations with a pause in between. This is not "flicker." This is an intentionally induced method of controlling the light output and also can be used to save power and lower heat generation in a lighting system.

This is also where things can get hinky. Certain frequencies of pulses can trigger epileptic fits. That's very well known at this point. However, it is my speculation that doing this at certain frequencies is capable of subconsciously manipulating humans in various ways, though I'm not at all capable of providing too much proof of that at this time. If you'll at least follow along for a bit, then we can at least have a discussion about this as a possible source of causing harm to humans.

If what I'm saying is true, that certain patterns of lighting can be harmful to humans natural rhythms, then, yes, LED lighting can be considered harmful and should be avoided, though that is nearly impossible these days if you come into contact with any "civilization." Store lighting is almost assuredly LED. Any vehicle on the road with LED headlights is absolutely using PWM driving of the headlights. (I find some engineering choices of what frequency to use to drive the headlights superlatively annoying, even if I understand some of why they choose the methods they do.)

As the saying goes, "dosage makes the poison."

How much of what kind of what color at what time is bad for us? I cannot tell you. It is not all bad. Nor is it all good. But I will state that I prefer nearly ANY LED lighting over awful fluorescent bulbs. I'm very glad those are nearly all phased out in most places I've come across.

Anyway... Just saying "LED bad" is daft. It is not all bad. You just have to be selective, just like with everything else.

Leathermint 2mo ago

I'm not gonna waste more time arguing with a Dunning Kruger effect. Take it up with the IEEE. They disagree that a good LED is flicker free. But I don't think you know what flickers are in this context.