What LED colour is in fashion right now?

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Orange or white.

Years ago I bought a lot of purple LEDs that slowly turned pink. I called it the "Burn-in Indicator." ;)

It pleases me to see I am not the only one experiencing this. I bought purple and pink LEDs and both were glowing blue after a few weeks. At a low current, I did not run them hot or something like that.

Anyhow, my latest device uses a black LED which is very refreshing.
 
I think a lot of people have bad experiences with white LEDs because they tend to be blinding. I have no issue with the white LEDs on my Apple products. They're small and relatively dim.

Blue is OK as well ... as long as it's not blinding. Mouser has exactly one (1) blue LED in stock that I like.

HiFi shows in the mid/late 1990s were bathed in blue LED light. I remember a Krell amp that had three blue LEDs on the front panel casting a cone of light on the floor similar to a flashlight beam. Too much, too much...

Tom
 
Somewhere I have some black ones, but allegedly they are just IR LEDs dyed black in the optical... I can see why they do that for IR photodiodes to reduce effects of stray light, but why for an IR emitting LED??
Some IR diodes are 900nm and quite invisible to the eye.
IR diodes for fibre optics used to be 850nm and the tail of their emission curve was just visible.

Transmitters might also use an optical filter to make them less visible to ccd cameras
 
Orange or white.

Years ago I bought a lot of purple LEDs that slowly turned pink. I called it the "Burn-in Indicator." ;)
Purple or pink are my choices. A cheap source of pink LEDs is a Christmas light string, 20 or 40 for next to nothing, all with longish wiring tails. I just snip another one off every now and then. Pink up-lighting on my amps is my latest lockdown time waster. :D A 100k 21 turn trimmer as a voltage divider lets me set them all at a similar level.
 
If you think about it a light source only has hue and saturation as the brightness depends on distance and lenses etc, whereas a pigment has hue, saturation and lightness, so the colours we use to describe objects are a superset of those that describe light sources.


For instance lights are never brown, as that's just dark orange, and I've never been convinced that indigo is a colour of the rainbow, its not a synonym for blue/violet its simply dark blue. Thus the rarest LEDs are brown, beige and indigo. And kharki also :)
 
The pink Christmas lights I use haven't noticeably faded in the last couple of years. Nor the purple push-button LEDs.
iu
 
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I prefer to have only one LED color visible at any one time on a component; more than that seems too carnival-like for my taste. My Pass-related projects all have blue LEDs, in deference to NP. They may also have a single red LED to indicate when the unit is in stand-by mode.

I'm at the beginning stages of a Salas UFSP build and that will have orange LEDs, which will match the LEDs on my other turntable-related devices (an SG-4 speed controller and a wired remote control to power my turntable's air pumps).

Invariably, I run LEDs at low levels -- 4 to 6 mA is my norm.

Oddly, I have LEDs in about 8 different colors in my collection. Whether I'll ever get around to using some of those colors is a mystery to me.

Regards,
Scott
 
For power indicators I like a mixture of blue and green. Now I don't like green by itself and I don't like blue by itself unless it's almost purple. But this turqouise or mint-green looks really nice with a black enclosure.

But if you want to be on the cutting edge there is no way around RGB for sure.
 
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