7 ms·

Doctors issue warning about effects of LED streetlights on health

75 points by cauterized 10y ago

JoeAltmaier 10y ago
What does the AMA know about LEDs and health? There's nothing in this article about why they made these recommendations. And the article compares LED lighting to 'before electricity', instead of to for instance existing sodium lamps? It is an opportune moment to make the recommendation, since folks are converting to LED so rapidly.
- zzalpha 10y ago
  Actually they specifically say why: glare and impact on circadian rhythms. Both of these are very well studied issues with light concentrated in the blue end of the spectrum (as opposed to sodium lamps that have very little blue emissions). BTW, they also failed to mention increased light pollution due to scattering.
  - stephengillie 10y ago
    How well studied are these topics? How many studies involved more than 1000 people?
- Natsu 10y ago
  There was a statement saying that too much blue light can harm the retina and some mentions of sleep-disrupting effects, but I tend to agree that the reasons why should have been given higher billing in the article as they're rather important.
- vacri 10y ago
  It's sort of the AMA's central mandate to know about things that affect health.
  - frabbit 10y ago
    Yeah, these people are just sawbones. Not statisticians. Their expertise is limited to how many freebies they can get from drug companies.
- stephengillie 10y ago
  This is just a fluff piece with a clickbait title, run by a new up-and-coming news site looking to earn some easy advertising revenue.
abootstrapper 10y ago
Could we just place a lens of some sort on pre existing led street lights to decrease the amount of blue light emitted?
- chiefofgxbxl 10y ago
  A filter to block out a bit of the excess blue light? This would reduce the effectiveness of the light output though, unless you amped up the output to raise all of the colors and then selectively suppressed the blue to help balance it out. Then this would require extra energy, which defeats the purpose of using LEDs to save energy.
  - joshkpeterson 10y ago
    You can just use a different color of LED. Honestly people in Seattle, where these LED lamps were first piloted, have been raising these concerns for at least 4 years. This is the product of some combination of bad design, a lack of user-centered thinking at the utilities, and less than ideal incentives. For example, daylight led's were touted as making it easier to identify cars involved in criminal activity because you can see the color of the vehicle more easily. But how many times has this actually made the difference in solving a crime?
    - analog31 10y ago
      One of the many hats that I wear at my day job is optics designer. An issue is that the white LED is a particular thing. It's a blue LED coated with a phosphor that absorbs some of the blue light, re-emits it at a broad range of longer wavelengths, while also passing some of the remaining blue light through. The blue is special -- 473 nanometers -- due to the solid state physics of the semiconductor. There is indeed an ongoing search for white LED designs that produce less glaring blue without sacrificing overall efficiency, but counterintuitively it's a hard design problem. People also want warmer light in their houses, so the problem is not limited to street lighting. The safety regulations have a special place in hell for "retinal blue" light. As it turns out every wavelength from UV into the IR has a set of weighting functions for estimating the overall hazard exposure. It's possibly a rare example of a truly science based regulation.
mullingitover 10y ago
> "In addition to its impact on drivers, blue-rich LED streetlights operate at a wavelength that most adversely suppresses melatonin during night." I wonder if this ends up saving thousands of lives by decreasing fatigue in drivers. The blue light argument seems like absolute hogwash; we're exposed to orders of magnitude brighter blue light every day. It's called daylight, and the streetlights dont't even emit UV.
- siegecraft 10y ago
  Yes, but daylight only occurs during the day, hence the name.
  - dingaling 10y ago
    > Yes, but daylight only occurs during the day, hence the name. Only because for more than a century the overwhelming majority of domestic light bulbs aped the colour temperature of candles, so that nightlight unconsciously became associated with yellowness. There's nothing inherently 'right' about warm yellow light, it's entirely subjective based upon conditioning. For example people in hot, arid climates describe blue-white light as relaxing because it is associated with the cooler early morning. To them, yellow light is the scorching midday Sun. Having lived exclusively with 'daylight' domestic lighting for nearly a decade I agree with them. The solution to disruptive street lighting is not to fiddle with colour temperatures but to turn off the lighting when it's not required. A residential street doesn't need to be illuminated at 03:00 if there are no cars or pedestrians, but managing that would require motion sensors. Easier just to let the bulb burn away through the night.
    - cauterized 10y ago
      And for eons before that, the light we had at night was fire. That's long enough for us to evolve to be sensitive to blue light as a signal of daytime while having decreased curcadian sensitivity to light at lower color temperatures.
- Dylan16807 10y ago
dang 10y ago
Url changed from http://www.cnn.com/2016/06/21/health/led-streetlights-ama/ http://www.cnn.com/2016/06/21/health/led-streetlights-ama/, which points to this.
- cauterized 10y ago
  Thank you!
brenschluss 10y ago
Title is misleading; it's not LED streetlights, it's the color temperature of LED streetlights. While the article raises a few good points, color temperature isn't new; it's not like LEDs have some inherent issue that impacts health.
- parennoob 10y ago
  As long as a sizeable majority of LED streetlight in current usage have the blue color temperature (currently, as far as I know all, or almost all of them do), that's an acceptable approximation. In any case, the original article's title mentions white LED streetlights -- so I guess making that clear in the title here might help.
- stormbeta 10y ago
  True, but there's a real problem with people and places using lights with far too high a temperature, and even when shopping for home LED lights it's surprisingly difficult to find low temperature lights that aren't low on lumens output. Pretty much anything over 3000K looks horribly blue at night, and if it wasn't such a massive pain to find them I'd prefer <2000K.
  - Laforet 10y ago
    I have a bigger issue with fluorescent lights: They have a discontinuous spectrum[0] that can mess with your perception of colour as well as a noticable flicker that gets worse as the tubes age. Some of the newer "warm tone" CFL bulbs appears to do better better on these aspects. [0]: http://minerva.union.edu/newmanj/Physics100/Light%20Production/LampSpectra.gif http://minerva.union.edu/newmanj/Physics100/Light%20Producti...
    - jhanschoo 10y ago
      Don't LEDs have a similar (or worse) spectral profile?
      - reportingsjr 10y ago
NetTechM 10y ago
I would argue that people with those crazy LED headlights are even worse. Since I often work late, I get the pleasure of being temporarily blinded as a white dwarf passes by at 45mph regularly.
- protomyth 10y ago
  They are a tad bit intense but they really save your bacon when there are deer in the ditches. I do wish there was a middle ground.
- mangeletti 10y ago
  I literally LOL @ "white dwarf". I absolutely agree, but, I have to admit... I have those lights :/ My last car was smashed by an idiot who didn't know how to back out of a parking spot, so rather than waiting for weeks while the body shop replaced the whole right side my car, I just traded it in for a new lease; a 2016 of same model. The new model has those stupid lights and I absolutely hate them. They're even unnatural and obnoxious to the person driving the car, not just the poor souls they're blinding. Unfortunately, most cars will likely have them within the next few years.
- steveax 10y ago
  And don't even get me started on the LED eye melters that cyclists are running these days. Some are about as bright as car headlights, but the spread and aim are inferior - especially since the folks that run those invariably seem to point them up from the horizontal. I keep thinking about mounting a 8 D cell maglight on a gimbal on my handlebars to give them a photon in-kind response.
  - beedogs 10y ago
    Just get a green laser and mess with the optics on it so there's a bit more beam spread at longer distances.
  - NegativeLatency 10y ago
    I think part of it is a reaction to the poor bicycle infrastructure in many cities. Bright lights have stopped cars from hitting me at night a couple of times. While I'm simpathetic to other people (I try not to point them in people's eyes) there aren't that many other options.
pizza 10y ago
Not my area of expertise by any means, but maybe quantum dots could be used to filter only a small sliver of the visible spectrum produced by streetlights. Maybe there could be very-nearly transparent foils that you could overlay over your windows that would block just that light.
jondiggsit 10y ago
And people go install 4,000 and 5,000K LED lights in their kitchens and homes because it feels modern, can you imagine the disruption. I always insist on installing 2,800K at a max with my clients.
- andrewpe 10y ago
  I have a couple of 4k LEDs in my kitchen, but also have much warmer LEDs in other places around my house. The reason the kitchen is different is so it feels sterile and clean. The cooler light gives this appearance more than warmer light. I guess the same reason many places have white counter tops.
tjmc 10y ago
Quite a few inaccuracies in the article which indicate misunderstanding of how additive light temperature works. You don't want to "cool it" - that means more blue! You want to warm it with less.
- mirimir 10y ago
  "Hot" and "cold" have different meanings in different contexts. In the article, they're referring to color temperature, which is about the temperature of the source, and assumes black-body spectrum. So 3000K means a source at 3000 Kelvins. Light from a 5000K source has more blue, and so is cooler. But the color temperature is higher (5000K vs 3000K).
nickhalfasleep 10y ago
Color temperature of "white" LEDs is due to the amount and type of phosphor to downconvert the blue LED spike to warmer colors. The more phosphor and conversion that goes on, the less total output (no free lunch in physics). So in markets where amount of light (like exterior lighting) is a selling point, vendors sell their cooler temperature LED's for performance.
nickbauman 10y ago
The article is saying "cool it and dim it" but I think they mean to say "warm it and dim it". They suggest the temperature should not be above 3000 kelvin.
- jwuphysics 10y ago
  That is because redder colors correspond to a cooler or lower color temperature. Colloquially, we think of blues as cool and reds as warm, but blue light is actually more energetic (or "hot") than red light.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - p1mrx 10y ago
    Probably because fire is red-orange, and snow is most often seen reflecting sunlight.
- ridgeguy 10y ago
  Yes. It's the blue component (large with high color temperature lights) that is thought to most strongly affect human melatonin secretion and sleep. Here's one of many studies that indicate this: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8979406 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8979406
  - stephengillie 10y ago
    Studies involving 5 subjects are not capable of being rigorous. Considering this with equal weight as LHC discoveries is harmful. Please stop.
    - ridgeguy 10y ago
      At posting, I didn't have time to provide more references. You'll see I've given three more references below. Sources include Acta Physiologica, SPIE, and Neuroscience Letters. They discuss different effects of illumination color temperature in human systems. I posted the initial reference as an entry point to follow literature on potential effects of illumination color temperature on human sleep, or perhaps circadian rhythms, through action on a hormone known to be critically involved in sleep. I didn't suggest it was the end of the story. My post was on topic and it contributed to the discussion. Would be glad to review data you think interesting. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/apha.12552/abstract;jsessionid=989DF70382D816B5118B4D8BE9921614.f03t03?userIsAuthenticated=false&deniedAccessCustomisedMessage= http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/apha.12552/abstra... http://proceedings.spiedigitallibrary.org/proceeding.aspx?articleid=1660969 http://proceedings.spiedigitallibrary.org/proceeding.aspx?ar... http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304394008006757 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304394008...
Mizza 10y ago
And what about laptop monitors?
- jahewson 10y ago
  https://justgetflux.com https://justgetflux.com
- noir_lord 10y ago
  Someone mentioned flux but on Linux gtk-redshift is awesome time.
  - srisa 10y ago
    You saved my eyes!! And that is not an exaggeration. I too recommend gtk-redshift if you are on Linux.
    - noir_lord 10y ago
      I really like gtk-redshift, you can play with the settings in ~/.config/redshift.conf as well I find that a lower gamma even at midday works well and I tweaked even more towards the red than the default.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
dsmithatx 10y ago
Any sources to studies done on the effects of light at different Kelvins? I'm really surprised as I would have expected LED light with more blue and looking natural to be preferable to orange Sodium Vapor lights. The sun which is our main light source puts out a wide spectrum. I'm surprised the lower wattage LED street lamps could cause actual health problems. I'm usually in bed during sleeping hours and not really exposed to the new blue LED street lights installed recently in my neighborhood though. As someone who has always been interested in Astronomy I do worry about light pollution. Having worked at Observatories I do know that only red light is used due to it's low impact on light pollution.
- emp_zealoth 10y ago
  LED spectra are usually tiny, sharp spikes, the home ones are getting slightly better, but the good ones are rather pricy. Incandescent or halogen bulbs feel more natural to me and their spectra look different
idiomatif1 10y ago
Actually, I hate LED cause it's too light.
sevensor 10y ago
Blue indicator LEDs on consumer electronics are a real plague. I had to cover the LEDs on a noise machine with electrical tape because of the harsh blue glow. I had to wonder what on earth the manufacturer was thinking -- this product is marketed to parents of newborns to help their babies sleep! Heartbeats, whalesong, blinding blue LEDs, white noise: one of these does not belong.

75 points by cauterized 10y ago

What does the AMA know about LEDs and health? There's nothing in this article about why they made these recommendations. And the article compares LED lighting to 'before electricity', instead of to for instance existing sodium lamps? It is an opportune moment to make the recommendation, since folks are converting to LED so rapidly.

zzalpha 10y ago
Actually they specifically say why: glare and impact on circadian rhythms. Both of these are very well studied issues with light concentrated in the blue end of the spectrum (as opposed to sodium lamps that have very little blue emissions). BTW, they also failed to mention increased light pollution due to scattering.
- stephengillie 10y ago
  How well studied are these topics? How many studies involved more than 1000 people?
Natsu 10y ago
There was a statement saying that too much blue light can harm the retina and some mentions of sleep-disrupting effects, but I tend to agree that the reasons why should have been given higher billing in the article as they're rather important.
vacri 10y ago
It's sort of the AMA's central mandate to know about things that affect health.
- frabbit 10y ago
  Yeah, these people are just sawbones. Not statisticians. Their expertise is limited to how many freebies they can get from drug companies.
stephengillie 10y ago
This is just a fluff piece with a clickbait title, run by a new up-and-coming news site looking to earn some easy advertising revenue.

abootstrapper 10y ago

Could we just place a lens of some sort on pre existing led street lights to decrease the amount of blue light emitted?

chiefofgxbxl 10y ago
A filter to block out a bit of the excess blue light? This would reduce the effectiveness of the light output though, unless you amped up the output to raise all of the colors and then selectively suppressed the blue to help balance it out. Then this would require extra energy, which defeats the purpose of using LEDs to save energy.
- joshkpeterson 10y ago
  You can just use a different color of LED. Honestly people in Seattle, where these LED lamps were first piloted, have been raising these concerns for at least 4 years. This is the product of some combination of bad design, a lack of user-centered thinking at the utilities, and less than ideal incentives. For example, daylight led's were touted as making it easier to identify cars involved in criminal activity because you can see the color of the vehicle more easily. But how many times has this actually made the difference in solving a crime?
  - analog31 10y ago
    One of the many hats that I wear at my day job is optics designer. An issue is that the white LED is a particular thing. It's a blue LED coated with a phosphor that absorbs some of the blue light, re-emits it at a broad range of longer wavelengths, while also passing some of the remaining blue light through. The blue is special -- 473 nanometers -- due to the solid state physics of the semiconductor. There is indeed an ongoing search for white LED designs that produce less glaring blue without sacrificing overall efficiency, but counterintuitively it's a hard design problem. People also want warmer light in their houses, so the problem is not limited to street lighting. The safety regulations have a special place in hell for "retinal blue" light. As it turns out every wavelength from UV into the IR has a set of weighting functions for estimating the overall hazard exposure. It's possibly a rare example of a truly science based regulation.

mullingitover 10y ago

> "In addition to its impact on drivers, blue-rich LED streetlights operate at a wavelength that most adversely suppresses melatonin during night." I wonder if this ends up saving thousands of lives by decreasing fatigue in drivers. The blue light argument seems like absolute hogwash; we're exposed to orders of magnitude brighter blue light every day. It's called daylight, and the streetlights dont't even emit UV.

siegecraft 10y ago
Yes, but daylight only occurs during the day, hence the name.
- dingaling 10y ago
  > Yes, but daylight only occurs during the day, hence the name. Only because for more than a century the overwhelming majority of domestic light bulbs aped the colour temperature of candles, so that nightlight unconsciously became associated with yellowness. There's nothing inherently 'right' about warm yellow light, it's entirely subjective based upon conditioning. For example people in hot, arid climates describe blue-white light as relaxing because it is associated with the cooler early morning. To them, yellow light is the scorching midday Sun. Having lived exclusively with 'daylight' domestic lighting for nearly a decade I agree with them. The solution to disruptive street lighting is not to fiddle with colour temperatures but to turn off the lighting when it's not required. A residential street doesn't need to be illuminated at 03:00 if there are no cars or pedestrians, but managing that would require motion sensors. Easier just to let the bulb burn away through the night.
  - cauterized 10y ago
    And for eons before that, the light we had at night was fire. That's long enough for us to evolve to be sensitive to blue light as a signal of daytime while having decreased curcadian sensitivity to light at lower color temperatures.
Dylan16807 10y ago

dang 10y ago

Url changed from http://www.cnn.com/2016/06/21/health/led-streetlights-ama/ http://www.cnn.com/2016/06/21/health/led-streetlights-ama/, which points to this.

cauterized 10y ago
Thank you!

brenschluss 10y ago

Title is misleading; it's not LED streetlights, it's the color temperature of LED streetlights. While the article raises a few good points, color temperature isn't new; it's not like LEDs have some inherent issue that impacts health.

parennoob 10y ago
As long as a sizeable majority of LED streetlight in current usage have the blue color temperature (currently, as far as I know all, or almost all of them do), that's an acceptable approximation. In any case, the original article's title mentions white LED streetlights -- so I guess making that clear in the title here might help.
stormbeta 10y ago
True, but there's a real problem with people and places using lights with far too high a temperature, and even when shopping for home LED lights it's surprisingly difficult to find low temperature lights that aren't low on lumens output. Pretty much anything over 3000K looks horribly blue at night, and if it wasn't such a massive pain to find them I'd prefer <2000K.
- Laforet 10y ago
  I have a bigger issue with fluorescent lights: They have a discontinuous spectrum[0] that can mess with your perception of colour as well as a noticable flicker that gets worse as the tubes age. Some of the newer "warm tone" CFL bulbs appears to do better better on these aspects. [0]: http://minerva.union.edu/newmanj/Physics100/Light%20Production/LampSpectra.gif http://minerva.union.edu/newmanj/Physics100/Light%20Producti...
  - jhanschoo 10y ago
    Don't LEDs have a similar (or worse) spectral profile?
    - reportingsjr 10y ago

NetTechM 10y ago

I would argue that people with those crazy LED headlights are even worse. Since I often work late, I get the pleasure of being temporarily blinded as a white dwarf passes by at 45mph regularly.

protomyth 10y ago
They are a tad bit intense but they really save your bacon when there are deer in the ditches. I do wish there was a middle ground.
mangeletti 10y ago
I literally LOL @ "white dwarf". I absolutely agree, but, I have to admit... I have those lights :/ My last car was smashed by an idiot who didn't know how to back out of a parking spot, so rather than waiting for weeks while the body shop replaced the whole right side my car, I just traded it in for a new lease; a 2016 of same model. The new model has those stupid lights and I absolutely hate them. They're even unnatural and obnoxious to the person driving the car, not just the poor souls they're blinding. Unfortunately, most cars will likely have them within the next few years.
steveax 10y ago
And don't even get me started on the LED eye melters that cyclists are running these days. Some are about as bright as car headlights, but the spread and aim are inferior - especially since the folks that run those invariably seem to point them up from the horizontal. I keep thinking about mounting a 8 D cell maglight on a gimbal on my handlebars to give them a photon in-kind response.
- beedogs 10y ago
  Just get a green laser and mess with the optics on it so there's a bit more beam spread at longer distances.
- NegativeLatency 10y ago
  I think part of it is a reaction to the poor bicycle infrastructure in many cities. Bright lights have stopped cars from hitting me at night a couple of times. While I'm simpathetic to other people (I try not to point them in people's eyes) there aren't that many other options.

pizza 10y ago

Not my area of expertise by any means, but maybe quantum dots could be used to filter only a small sliver of the visible spectrum produced by streetlights. Maybe there could be very-nearly transparent foils that you could overlay over your windows that would block just that light.

jondiggsit 10y ago

And people go install 4,000 and 5,000K LED lights in their kitchens and homes because it feels modern, can you imagine the disruption. I always insist on installing 2,800K at a max with my clients.

andrewpe 10y ago
I have a couple of 4k LEDs in my kitchen, but also have much warmer LEDs in other places around my house. The reason the kitchen is different is so it feels sterile and clean. The cooler light gives this appearance more than warmer light. I guess the same reason many places have white counter tops.

tjmc 10y ago

Quite a few inaccuracies in the article which indicate misunderstanding of how additive light temperature works. You don't want to "cool it" - that means more blue! You want to warm it with less.

mirimir 10y ago
"Hot" and "cold" have different meanings in different contexts. In the article, they're referring to color temperature, which is about the temperature of the source, and assumes black-body spectrum. So 3000K means a source at 3000 Kelvins. Light from a 5000K source has more blue, and so is cooler. But the color temperature is higher (5000K vs 3000K).

nickhalfasleep 10y ago

Color temperature of "white" LEDs is due to the amount and type of phosphor to downconvert the blue LED spike to warmer colors. The more phosphor and conversion that goes on, the less total output (no free lunch in physics). So in markets where amount of light (like exterior lighting) is a selling point, vendors sell their cooler temperature LED's for performance.

nickbauman 10y ago

The article is saying "cool it and dim it" but I think they mean to say "warm it and dim it". They suggest the temperature should not be above 3000 kelvin.

jwuphysics 10y ago
That is because redder colors correspond to a cooler or lower color temperature. Colloquially, we think of blues as cool and reds as warm, but blue light is actually more energetic (or "hot") than red light.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- p1mrx 10y ago
  Probably because fire is red-orange, and snow is most often seen reflecting sunlight.
ridgeguy 10y ago
Yes. It's the blue component (large with high color temperature lights) that is thought to most strongly affect human melatonin secretion and sleep. Here's one of many studies that indicate this: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8979406 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8979406
- stephengillie 10y ago
  Studies involving 5 subjects are not capable of being rigorous. Considering this with equal weight as LHC discoveries is harmful. Please stop.
  - ridgeguy 10y ago
    At posting, I didn't have time to provide more references. You'll see I've given three more references below. Sources include Acta Physiologica, SPIE, and Neuroscience Letters. They discuss different effects of illumination color temperature in human systems. I posted the initial reference as an entry point to follow literature on potential effects of illumination color temperature on human sleep, or perhaps circadian rhythms, through action on a hormone known to be critically involved in sleep. I didn't suggest it was the end of the story. My post was on topic and it contributed to the discussion. Would be glad to review data you think interesting. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/apha.12552/abstract;jsessionid=989DF70382D816B5118B4D8BE9921614.f03t03?userIsAuthenticated=false&deniedAccessCustomisedMessage= http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/apha.12552/abstra... http://proceedings.spiedigitallibrary.org/proceeding.aspx?articleid=1660969 http://proceedings.spiedigitallibrary.org/proceeding.aspx?ar... http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304394008006757 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304394008...

Mizza 10y ago

And what about laptop monitors?

jahewson 10y ago
https://justgetflux.com https://justgetflux.com
noir_lord 10y ago
Someone mentioned flux but on Linux gtk-redshift is awesome time.
- srisa 10y ago
  You saved my eyes!! And that is not an exaggeration. I too recommend gtk-redshift if you are on Linux.
  - noir_lord 10y ago
    I really like gtk-redshift, you can play with the settings in ~/.config/redshift.conf as well I find that a lower gamma even at midday works well and I tweaked even more towards the red than the default.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

dsmithatx 10y ago

Any sources to studies done on the effects of light at different Kelvins? I'm really surprised as I would have expected LED light with more blue and looking natural to be preferable to orange Sodium Vapor lights. The sun which is our main light source puts out a wide spectrum. I'm surprised the lower wattage LED street lamps could cause actual health problems. I'm usually in bed during sleeping hours and not really exposed to the new blue LED street lights installed recently in my neighborhood though. As someone who has always been interested in Astronomy I do worry about light pollution. Having worked at Observatories I do know that only red light is used due to it's low impact on light pollution.

emp_zealoth 10y ago
LED spectra are usually tiny, sharp spikes, the home ones are getting slightly better, but the good ones are rather pricy. Incandescent or halogen bulbs feel more natural to me and their spectra look different

idiomatif1 10y ago

Actually, I hate LED cause it's too light.

sevensor 10y ago

Blue indicator LEDs on consumer electronics are a real plague. I had to cover the LEDs on a noise machine with electrical tape because of the harsh blue glow. I had to wonder what on earth the manufacturer was thinking -- this product is marketed to parents of newborns to help their babies sleep! Heartbeats, whalesong, blinding blue LEDs, white noise: one of these does not belong.