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Comment by pilif | Hacker News Reader

> I think blue was the most expensive.

yes. Which is why to this day so many "cool" accessories insist on blue LEDs as a power indicator making them completely useless whenever too much light would actually be harmful to the experience (like the Playstation Power LED, or any other power LED on devices you have in your bedroom).

The blue LEDs feel so incredibly bright compared to all other LED types to the point where they become very distracting.

Blue light isn't cool any more (I would argue that it never was in the first place). Stop adding blue LEDs to all your devices. Please.

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There is also increasing concern about eye health risks involved with blue LEDs, so tread carefully. I recently had to swap vendors on a project because the cheaper blue LEDs threw too much of the hazardous spectrum. The EU is way ahead of the US on this.

http://www.cree.com/~/media/Files/Cree/LED%20Components%20an...

I had no idea, thank you!

I can barely look at existing blue LEDs these days, which sucks because they're on every emergency phone beacon on college campuses (which I live around).

Too late. Semiotically blue now means 'power LED/main button', so monitors, computer cases, etcetera all have one blue LED for the power button. Even your toaster has a blue LED on its on/off-switch.

Changing this will take years. Perhaps premium brands will start making red power LEDs hip again, and we will enter a period of red LEDs (again). On the other hand, violet power LEDs might become fashionable, so count your blessings.

I was amused that the HTPC computer case I chose had a small slider just below the blue power indicator; you can slide it to the right, and the blue is no longer visible.

A customer currently wants to return a 12 bay NAS because the blue power LED is too bright for their office.

Did you tell him to put a piece of tape over it?

ThinkGeek used to have it, I found on amazon:

https://www.amazon.com/LightDims-Original-Strength-Electroni...

I just use gaffers tape. Edit and if you need to see the light sometimes the I make a flap by folding it over so it covers it up but some parts are not sticky.

Another idea is to use a black Sharpie on the offending LED. Blocks most, but not all, of the light.

This is a really clever trick, I'm surprised I haven't heard it before.

"Hide your indicator lights" really isn't reasonable, but marker or masking tape would be good candidates for blocking 80%+ of the light.

It might be a good proxy for quality. A company that used such devices, that they made, would almost certainly have a problem with the eye-melting brightness of the LEDs. A good company would be expected to correct it.

My NAS has a brightness control for its LEDs. You can even set a schedule so they're off at night only...

I think you might be overstating the strength of the association. Around me now I have 3 power buttons with white light [0], and 2 with blue light [1]. The color isn't very important because the power symbol makes the purpose of the button obvious.

[0]: a Dell tower PC, a MBP with power button on the keyboard that is backlit like any other key, and a Dell monitor

[1]: two other models of Dell monitor

I have blue, red, white, green power LEDs pointing at me now. Green is my preference for fully powered on indication.

Some high-end monitors provide control over the power LED. My friend's NEC monitor even has a brightness control for it.

That reminds me that I covered the bright blue LED on the bottom bezel of my ViewSonic LCD with electrical tape a couple years ago. I can't believe nobody at ViewSonic thought it would be a bad idea to focus a bright blue LED towards the user of a display.

I just double checked to make sure, no LED control on this monitor :(

I've got some low-end no-name from about 2008. It's got 3 layers of paper taped over the blue power light to make it reasonable. There's also the Antec Sonata case from about 2004...it's got 2 super-bright blue LEDs with reflectors. Here's a wonderful idea: design a case to look understatedly elegant, then give it two bright blue headlights. I disconnected them after the first night.

Once you're at the point where you have to further decrease your margin in order to make some purely cosmetical feature configurable, maybe it's time that you re-think whether you really need that feature in the first place or not.

Or in this case specifically, maybe it's time to rethink whether you really need a power LED on your monitor as it will be undoubtedly obvious whether a monitor is in-fact powered or not by just looking at it.

> as it will be undoubtedly obvious whether a monitor is in-fact powered or not by just looking at it.

Will it? Is the screen dark because it's off (janitor bumped it at night), because my laptop didn't wake up when I docked it, or because I forgot to plug the cable back in after fooling with an SBC on that monitor yesterday?

The power light makes the state of the monitor obvious, and so does an image displaying on it. The light's useful for the edge cases when there isn't an image being displayed.

"Too late. Semiotically blue now means 'power LED/main button', so monitors, computer cases, etcetera all have one blue LED for the power button. Even your toaster has a blue LED on its on/off-switch."

Red/off, green/on (stop/go) has a much, much deeper symbolic link and would be easy to adopt and be understood - no matter how entrenched blue LED symbolism has, or will, become.

The threat with red, though, is that it also has a strong symbolic link to "error". If you power down your console and suddenly see a red light, it conjures up awful memories of the Xbox 360.

Probably not ideal for the significant chunk of the population with red/green color blindness though.

For the sake of both efficiency and reason, "off" needs no color of LED at all.

This is a real shame. Dim red lights are the hallmark of standby/warning for good reason - they're non-distracting and comfortable to have lots of. It's a real shame that blue took over when it's probably the worst color available.

And as an aside, having a light that turns on to tell you when a product is off/asleep is just offensively bad design.

Presumably it reduces the number of support calls solved by "did you plug it in?"

Comfortable to have lots of warning lights?

Red is still best because night vision... that's why bedside clocks are still mostly red.

They are very annoying. I have several layers of electrical tape over most of my electronics--one layer is usually not enough!

Electrical tape does the job in one application. You can even buy matching colors if standard black contrasts with your device/bezel/case.

edit: sorry, did not see 'electrical' in your post. What device has luminosity to shine through e*tape? My electric toothbrush can illuminate entire bathroom, hall and most of my attached bedroom. 1 strip cured it.

HDD light on a run of the mill tower PC case. The random blinking makes it particularly bad in a dark room. I could see the whole room light up with HDD activity through one layer of e. tape.

I literally put tape and nail polish over any blue leds. Leave it so just a little light gets out and they become tolerable for non-bedroom use. All bedroom leds are duck taped over and phones are put led side down.

> I think blue was the most expensive.

When blue LEDs were first available in sample quantities, the R&D Lab in which I worked ordered a few 5mm blues for £35 each - no free samples available!

The blue light were brighter - they have a mechanism different from the old LEDs that is much more efficient. I guess the designers just dropped in the blue leds, and voilá, terrible bright lights.

The other colors later followed suit - the brightness you now get with a few mA is amazing when you know the old LEDs.

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