Cities are swapping traditional light bulbs for more energy-efficient brighter LEDs. The rise of these blue LEDs are creating problems for our night sky and our health.
So what I heard a long time ago is that all LED lights essentially strobe on and off constantly, faster than the human eye can detect, though i’m willing to bet the better ones are constructed in a way that you wouldn’t notice at all (whether with the naked eye, or through a high shutter speed camera, as you mentioned), but the shittier ones strobe more frequently and not at a rate that’s as smooth/consistent as the better ones. As a little anecdote, I bought a lower quality light-tablet for tracing a while back, and was getting crazy headaches after using it for maybe an hour or so. Had to stop using it, and I think it must be an example of what poor quality LEDs are like.
So LEDs can either be strobed or powered consistently with no blinking at all. It’s a design choice and it depends on how you convert the power from AC to DC and how you want to control the brightness of the LED. It’s cheaper to feed an LED power that is modulated/strobes so all the cheap vendors do that. You can also get away with strobing the LED to achieve a brightness assuming you do it at a very high frequency so our eyes don’t perceive it. If you buy a quality LED light fixture there should be no strobing effect what so ever.
So what I heard a long time ago is that all LED lights essentially strobe on and off constantly, faster than the human eye can detect, though i’m willing to bet the better ones are constructed in a way that you wouldn’t notice at all (whether with the naked eye, or through a high shutter speed camera, as you mentioned), but the shittier ones strobe more frequently and not at a rate that’s as smooth/consistent as the better ones. As a little anecdote, I bought a lower quality light-tablet for tracing a while back, and was getting crazy headaches after using it for maybe an hour or so. Had to stop using it, and I think it must be an example of what poor quality LEDs are like.
So LEDs can either be strobed or powered consistently with no blinking at all. It’s a design choice and it depends on how you convert the power from AC to DC and how you want to control the brightness of the LED. It’s cheaper to feed an LED power that is modulated/strobes so all the cheap vendors do that. You can also get away with strobing the LED to achieve a brightness assuming you do it at a very high frequency so our eyes don’t perceive it. If you buy a quality LED light fixture there should be no strobing effect what so ever.