> 46 inch HDTV
Google comes through again: GAM rosco color gel rolls - Google Search
They’ve got you covered. 48” x 25 foot rolls are available
I know those measurements is from ledmuseum, i just want you to test f.lux at some of the warmer setting to see what you think & tell me about it, because you can visually compare to your gels.
You call f.lux their product, you know it is a free download right? even if they did a measurement on one specific monitor that measurement would be meaningless because there are as many setups as there are monitors in existence, no two monitors have the exact same calibration, thats why its so hard to correctly calibrate most of them.
Just as you can’t copy an calibration setup from one monitor to another you can’t look at one f.lux measurement and draw to far conclusion on how it would look on your monitor.
Set it to 2300K or lower to remove much of the blue from the screen.
Did you notice that the Roscolux #23 orange spectrum measurement was from a incandescent(tungsten) 6500K light, that gel is only that spectrum when it is used with the same light source, if you use it with a 6500K calibrated LCD screen it will most likely have a very different spectrum.
You know your gels work right? test f.lux with a setting that looks similar to your gels and see if you get the same effect from it.
And you can probably combine the effect of the gels & f.lux to get even better blue cancellation 
Nice you were right, they have 48x25 inches rolls of gel filter, but for $160 though, and still way to big to change every day & i guess it would have to be mounted on a big frame. I don’t see it as a workable solution, but who knows when i see it on the phone maybe i like it enough to mess with it.
that’s 48 inches by 25 feet
I’d bet if you ask the supplier who they sell to in your area, that you can locate a theatrical/photo supplier that has those rolls as part of their stock, and sells by the foot to theatres and photographers.l
I found a site selling a couple of cheap 3xAA lights —- cost around $15 apiece. Might try these:
dx also has that one: http://www.dx.com/p/pange-230lm-3-mode-rotate-zooming-cool-white-flashlight-w-cree-xp-e-q5-green-3-x-aa-343427 ($13.28)
Found that one reviewed/modded at Small Sun ZY-123 mod
and that review led me to
http://www.dx.com/p/6-led-50lm-1-mode-white-light-flashlight-blue-3-x-aa-139374 (cheap, plastic pill, maybe moddable, under $5)
and more, dx at least has a decent page for AA lights that’s searchable
http://www.dx.com/p/small-sum-zy-515-60lm-led-white-flashlight-black-3-x-aa-190082 ($10)
http://www.dx.com/p/pange-rr1-led-150lm-1-mode-white-outdoor-flashlight-black-3-x-aa-353873 (about $6.59, can’t tell if it has a pill …)
okay, I can work with some of these 3xAA lights to make more amber lights easily enough.
bump for an easy way to deal with the blue light problem
Yeah, we know about the glasses, but you don’t get a complete seal around the face so white light leaks in.
THey’re good for sitting still and watching TV or using the computer with other room lights off, basically.
But don’t try to find them before you open your eyes if you wake up during the night and turn on a white light.
And they’re not practical for working with them doing anything like moving around taking care of an infant or milking a cow.
And you can’t keep them on a baby or little kid, the ones you most want to sleep through the night.
I have that kind of yellow glasses, I’ve given them to anyone interested — but everyone who’s used them says about the same thing I’m saying here.
You can buy the same thing much cheaper than at lowbluelights — that site has good advice but not good prices, in my opinion.
Not optimal. Not all you need.
If you don’t wear glasses they work great, if you do then you have to be more careful but they still work fine, but yeah, their prices are not great
Maybe add some dye also to get rid of residual blue. I would start with cool white rather than with royal blue. Phosphors seem to work about equally for any shorter wavelength. Cool white is easier to find and gives you a head start.
I suspect some blue must leak through also in the Philips PC amber, though the spec. sheet doesn’t show it. Or maybe they use dye.
This one?
from the aquarium people
http://www.advancedaquarist.com/2014/4/lighting_album/image014.jpg
The reef buliders give color a lot of attention. Many more spectra here: An Updated LED Guide v1.1 - Lighting Forum - Nano-Reef Community
And here’s the technology: http://www.opticsinfobase.org/view_article.cfm?gotourl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.opticsinfobase.org%2FDirectPDFAccess%2FB088C13E-EFB9-FE77-F728EB1DC33BEAEE_199457%2Foe-18-11-11063.pdf%3Fda%3D1%26id%3D199457%26seq%3D0%26mobile%3Dno&org=
Full down-conversion of amber-emitting phosphor-converted light-emitting diodes with powder phosphors and a long-wave pass filter
I see a lot of nice 3xAA lights in this thread. I will refer back to it if I need others for people who don’t want to use lithium ion batteries.
Here is a long run time light: http://www.tmart.com/X2-CREE-T6-10W-1200LM-200m-Range-Aviation-Aluminum-Alloy-Flashlight-Torch-Gray_p186586.html . 3xD, $23.13. I ordered one. There are D size Eneloops. The figure given for run time is ridiculously low.
Are there any sodium lights still available or on surplus?
> 3xD at T-Mart
Nice! thank you, I’ve ordered one. (I see they’re also available for cough*$90*cough on Amazon …)
Low pressure sodium streetlights are still available — astronomers love them for good reason
http://www.nofs.navy.mil/about_NOFS/darksky/LPSnet/LPS-references.html
None small enough for household use, though.
Way too much light for places with limited battery power.
Though I wish more rural folks would choose them instead of the blue-white mercury vapor lights for outdoors (sigh)
Meanwhile, I’m succeeding with the 4/3AF NiMH cells — those are about the size of 18650s, so I can cough*recycle*cough some of my older flashlights to my friends.
So far using a DX driver SKU 7880 (out of stock at the moment) but it’s way crazy complicated:
Next going to try this: http://www.dx.com/p/ak-007-0-8-1-5v-3-mode-circuit-board-for-flashlights-11-9mm-50526
No good 3xAAs so far.
These from DX are utter crap, with 5mm leds, no drivers; resistor only.
353873 Pange RR1 LED 150lm 1-Mode White Outdoor Flashlight - Black (3 x AA) (all plastic, soft crappy plastic at that)
190082 SMALL SUM ZY-515 60lm LED White Flashlight - Black (3 x AA) (actually “Small Sun” — metal battery tube is the one salvageable part of it, all the rest is plastic)
I’ve been musing over the Tractor Supply / JobSmart 3xAA pointer, tempted — not sure how easily it can be modded to put in an amber emitter.
Certainly next time I am going through Petaluma I’ll go by and look at one, not going to do the 50 mile round trip just for that tho’
Still looking for more info online about how it’s made.
OH, right here — is a description: SOLD - Modified Jobsmart Flashlight - 3AA XM-L T4 Copper Heatsink Custom Paint
Meanwhile I’m going to drill out a couple of ancient Brinkmann 3xAAs, the “Mag’s Mods” simple method to make P60 dropins fit into them.
Just wanted to bring up the new Hugsbys, in case they didn’t pop up allready:
Don’t know about the modes, I think there is something in the 10$ flashlight reference.
1AA XP-11: Link to Ali
2AA XP-12: Link to Ali
Fasttech has them at twice the price.
I installed red led strips yesterday to compliment my amber ones i use the last hour/hours before bed, and i really really like it the combination gives better contrast so it is easier to read & focus on details in low dim light.
I haven’t slept this good in a long time
I also installed twilight on my android smartphone, and it works really good to dim & lower the color temperature.
In combination with f.lux on the PC & amber/red light strips i would say, i am closing in on that no disturbing green/blue light the last hours before bed, i have been craving since i learnt how bad it was for your sleep & health
I can’t express how smooth & great it feels to wake & turn of the alarm with dark adjusted eyes on a very very dim red phone screen, instead of a glaringly harsh blue screen thats way to bright even on the lowest standard setting, and then turn on the red/amber light lowly dimmed and slowly turning it up as my eyes awaken.
I used the word believe because, i asked you to test out f.lux yourself to see if it was effective for you and you never responded, making me think that you had written off the idea without even trying it. Because as i said then, the combination of f.lux & similar programs + gel filters if needed should be superior than either alone.
And it sounded like your opinion of f.lux was based on LEDMuseums comparisons, and if you have done your own test now i think you will agree with me, that the spectrum they showed can’t have been from one of the current f.lux lowest colour temperature modes. And if am right that would mean, that is not a very representative picture of how much of the blue can be eliminated with a correctly tuned f.lux.
I think most who are unsatisfied with f.lux’s blue cancelling ability have, tested an old version before the lower colour modes became available, an low contrast screen limiting the potential to block any kind of light, or set up f.lux wrong & never seen the lowest modes.
But i agree with you here hank no blue at all is of course best, but what a correctly set up f.lux does with the problem of 6500k calibrated screens goes a long way to lessen the negative impact of them.
And i just told you OLED & plasma based screens have self emissive subpixels, if the calibration tells the screen the colour mix should be totally biased towards red so the blue sub pixel is off it would be.
And displays generally don’t have white pixels, they have a Red, Green, Blue subpixel for RGB There is a Sharp line of panels that have a yellow also.
Generally the higher the contrast you can find in a screen, the higher the subpixels ability to block or cancel out the colour not wanted with the colour filters, that is what the different sub pixels are in LCD displays, different colour filters similar to the gel colour filters you use.
If you want to change the bias more thoroughly than what f.lux can provide you need to change the calibration & set up a “after dark” mode like i have done.
My monitor is the Samsung 46C750 HDTV it has about 3000ANSI contrast & is one of the last high end CCFL TV’s made, after that everything turned LED backlit (or maybe one could call it sidelit ;)), it could be a reason for that it is more effective at cancelling out the blues but the contrast plays a big part also.
For example on my Android phone i run the latest Cyanogenmod 12.1, it has a new feature called LiveDisplay, it is a very basic CMS where you can turn the green & blue subpixels almost completely off, & lower the colour temperature as low as 1000K for the Android GUI, BUT because the screen i have on my phone probably don’t have more contrast than maybe ~800 i still get a slight blue glare from the screen if i look at it from distance.
If it would have had a much higher contrast or max light blocking ability (that is what contrast in essence is) or been a OLED screen with almost unlimited contrast because it is self emmisive, it wouldn’t have that blue leak even when it is calibrated bias mostly to red. But even so it is much nicer than nothing to be able to tune the colours on for a night mode than nothing
If you want to tune the colour bias more to your liking you need to learn how to calibrate your displays, but this is tricky more so on monitors than HDTV’s, because cheaper monitors usually don’t have
inbuilt calibration controls like a CMS or a 10 point white point control like most better HDTV’s have.
Check out avsforums Display Calibration to start with for example, if you want to learn how to calibrate your displays.
With lots of useful information. Cajampa, thanks for leading me here, and Hank I hope you succeed with your farm project.
Side benefits of your thoughtful discussions, so far, for me:
1. I no longer feel crazy/guilty for stockpiling incandescent bulbs for my (farm) home.
2. New appreciation for eye/brain/light spectrum issues, which I intend to research much further now.
Cheers!
I’ve tried both old and new f.lux with the MacBook monitor, basically to check and see what the spectrometer detects — but the screen hasn’t been bright enough for the little $40 kit spectrometer to say much, the result comes out like this:
You can see the bump at the 450nm end; intensity isn’t useful at those light levels though.
The spectrometer software was pretty flaky for a while and is being rewritten now, and I’ve taken the spectrometer apart to build their v3 kit. More news when I have any
Good stuff on ledmuseum. He evaluated the Asus brand of monitor I use (with f.lux.) But I notice the dates are from a while back. (I wish more stuff on the internet was timestamped or dated.)
When I was shopping for my monitor I found this in a review. Quote:
You may notice in the specs [of the Asus monitor being reviewed] a type of backlight we haven’t covered here before: GB-r-LED. The vast majority of LED screens use white LEDs (W-LED) on the top and bottom edges of the panel. A white LED emits blue light through a yellow phosphor, which neutralizes its color temp to around 6500 Kelvin. This is very easy and cheap to implement, and that’s why it’s so common. At the other end of the spectrum, we have RGB-LED which is literally red, green, and blue LEDs arrayed directly behind the LCD panel. This is very expensive and difficult to manufacture, and therefore quite rare.
The compromise is found in GB-r-LED technology. Here, the backlight consists of green and blue diodes coated with a red phosphor. The net effect is that the spectral peaks of the three primary colors are pretty much even. With W-LED, the spectral peak is much higher for blue. So, software (and the panel’s color filters) must intervene to achieve the correct color balance. A GB-r-LED panel is more accurate natively, making software and the color filter layer less critical. And you get the added benefit of the wider Adobe RGB gamut. It is a bit more expensive to manufacture than W-LED, but less so than RGB-LED.
Source: Asus ProArt PQ279Q Monitor Review: 27-Inch, Wide-Gamut, QHD | Tom's Hardware
The question is “what does the f.lux software actually do to control these leds?” At any rate, it’s pretty amusing to be on the computer at sunset. The f.lux kicks in, then the monitor seems to compensate, so the screen gradually shifts to deep yellowish-orange, then it comes back to a nice restful hue (to my eyes.) At least the software marks the passage of time by letting me know when sunset arrives.
It’s hard to find out exactly what wavelength is emitted — the key seems to be blocking or omitting 470 to 525nm, which is up to the middle of the green range roughly — per http://press.endocrine.org/doi/abs/10.1210/jc.2004-2062
(that’s from http://www.sleepinthedark.com/540nm.html — I find new websites every time I search on these questions, but most seem to link back to the same research)
This one does a good job of distinguishing color temperature (what we see) from emitted spectra. That’s where it’s hard to find out exactly what wavelength is being produced. It’s much easier to get color temperature information — but that often enough obscures the question what wavelengths are going into producing that color temperature.
I have some friends who’d been doing fine with amber LEDs, for a few years — then someone got them a nice buttery yellow “warm white” LED and they’ve been using that for more than a year. And their sleep fell apart, one of them ended up on sleeping pills. They simply failed to realize that their “warm white” color temperature still had a blue-green emission spike. I got them back to pure amber light sources — 590nm emitters — and, lo, problem solved. Again.
Duh.
I’d like to do more with color-mixing flashlights just to make this sort of thing easier to explain.
The “color temperature” section at that http://www.sleepinthedark.com/540nm.html page — page down a few to get to it — shows four different spectra that are all perceived as “white light” as an example of color mixing.
It’s not intuitive how this stuff works just for color vision. Throw in the newly discovered receptor for blue-green that controls sleep, and it’s way strange.