If it's good enough for Stu Maschwitz, it's good enough for me.
> A small light source will be rendered as an aperture shaped figure with quite well defined edges in bokeh; but gaussian blur renders it as a spot with fading edges. In bokeh, noise is present at the same level as in in focus parts of image with same luminance; gaussian blur kills noise, so there'll be less noise than in non blurred parts of image. In bokeh, light areas will dominate over dark ones, while gaussian blur preserves the ratio of dark light areas.
Source: https://photo.stackexchange.com/questions/21459/whats-the-di...