Pac-Fan
New member
Sorry to bump an old thread but it's relevant to my recent testing of the cheap Ablaze LED's in my High Speed pinball.
I bought one of the sample kits from SpiderKnife on eBay ($14 shipped for a set of 21 Ablaze LEDs, 7 colors, one each of Flat, Concave and Flat frosted, plus a dome color changing one).
After numerous trial and errors, I found:
* Unacceptable GI illumination from all, including backbox use. Way too hot centers, and the concave simply made larger more prominent rings as well as a hot center. And of course the cold color temp made it icky looking either on the playfield or backbox, and the throw of them including concave doesn't come close to matching incandescents in either location.
* Yellow is actually closer to gold than yellow. Made yellow inserts still look light orange/gold. (Though significantly closer to yellow than an incandescent)
* Green and Red helped improve the richness of those inserts, both round and triangular
* Orange was not bright enough. White behind orange made the orange actually look orange, and not rust/burn-red orange like an incandescent. (Closer to what the yellow inserts look like on HS with an incandescent.)
* White behind yellows made them finally look like Yellow! Not a bright orange like an incandescent. There was a super-very-small tinge of yellow green tint (due to the cool/blue nature of the whites) but it is acceptable to finally have clearly yellow inserts that closer match the yellow of the stop light targets. Between moving the yellow inserts towards yellow and away from orange, and the orange inserts away from red, helped make them really stand out as different and pop (in a good way).
* Purple has no use on the HS set, and along with white replacing yellow and orange, that leaves just White, Red, Green to use for inserts; leaving blue.
* Blue actually looks very nice under the clear inserts in the RPM dial (1000 to 9000 points). They were originally warm white/yellow-orange due to the incandescents, but since the dial is surrounded by blue, using blue in those made it look really nice. Not original but nice. Hey, many new cars are blue LED lit too
I found that the frosted bulbs worked best for all the inserts, including the couple that are at an angle to the playfield. They slightly soften the sharp edges of the patterns under the inserts, and work acceptable at the low angle ones as well.
I only noted a tiny bit of ghosting on a couple in the matrix during demo mode of the wipes across the PF. They were super dim almost unoticeable and not something that would keep me from swapping since it seemed to only be a coupe of them, though I didn't swap out the entire PF yet, just a few key ones to test colors.
I was about to place an order with PinballLife and saw they were out of a lot of colors of the .39c Ablaze, but were to be back in tomorrow. When I looked today, they no longer even list the .39c Ablaze in either bayonet or wedge Hope it's just temporary -- of course a few days after I started looking, after owning he machine 4 1/2 years
I did not get any to test changing the flashers. At the price for those in LED, I will be leaving incandescents in at about 1/10th the price--they're not on that often anyway.
I will miss the fade in/fade out of an incandescent, it will be interesting to see how the attract mode looks when everythings on and off instantly. Mixed with incandescents there wasn't perfect flow, all one or the other should be okay.
Finally, a mechanical issue I ran into.. the Ablaze bayonet bases have their prongs significantly farther away from the base tip than an incandescent. This required much more force compressing the socket's springs, and in some cases barely allowed me to twist to lock. In two cases, the LED separated from the base at the point of the color ring (ring stayed with LED plastic). Wonder how far they will compress the springs making any issue in the future using a more normal base alignment.
I bought one of the sample kits from SpiderKnife on eBay ($14 shipped for a set of 21 Ablaze LEDs, 7 colors, one each of Flat, Concave and Flat frosted, plus a dome color changing one).
After numerous trial and errors, I found:
* Unacceptable GI illumination from all, including backbox use. Way too hot centers, and the concave simply made larger more prominent rings as well as a hot center. And of course the cold color temp made it icky looking either on the playfield or backbox, and the throw of them including concave doesn't come close to matching incandescents in either location.
* Yellow is actually closer to gold than yellow. Made yellow inserts still look light orange/gold. (Though significantly closer to yellow than an incandescent)
* Green and Red helped improve the richness of those inserts, both round and triangular
* Orange was not bright enough. White behind orange made the orange actually look orange, and not rust/burn-red orange like an incandescent. (Closer to what the yellow inserts look like on HS with an incandescent.)
* White behind yellows made them finally look like Yellow! Not a bright orange like an incandescent. There was a super-very-small tinge of yellow green tint (due to the cool/blue nature of the whites) but it is acceptable to finally have clearly yellow inserts that closer match the yellow of the stop light targets. Between moving the yellow inserts towards yellow and away from orange, and the orange inserts away from red, helped make them really stand out as different and pop (in a good way).
* Purple has no use on the HS set, and along with white replacing yellow and orange, that leaves just White, Red, Green to use for inserts; leaving blue.
* Blue actually looks very nice under the clear inserts in the RPM dial (1000 to 9000 points). They were originally warm white/yellow-orange due to the incandescents, but since the dial is surrounded by blue, using blue in those made it look really nice. Not original but nice. Hey, many new cars are blue LED lit too
I found that the frosted bulbs worked best for all the inserts, including the couple that are at an angle to the playfield. They slightly soften the sharp edges of the patterns under the inserts, and work acceptable at the low angle ones as well.
I only noted a tiny bit of ghosting on a couple in the matrix during demo mode of the wipes across the PF. They were super dim almost unoticeable and not something that would keep me from swapping since it seemed to only be a coupe of them, though I didn't swap out the entire PF yet, just a few key ones to test colors.
I was about to place an order with PinballLife and saw they were out of a lot of colors of the .39c Ablaze, but were to be back in tomorrow. When I looked today, they no longer even list the .39c Ablaze in either bayonet or wedge
Hope it's just temporary -- of course a few days after I started looking, after owning he machine 4 1/2 years I did not get any to test changing the flashers. At the price for those in LED, I will be leaving incandescents in at about 1/10th the price--they're not on that often anyway.
I will miss the fade in/fade out of an incandescent, it will be interesting to see how the attract mode looks when everythings on and off instantly. Mixed with incandescents there wasn't perfect flow, all one or the other should be okay.
Finally, a mechanical issue I ran into.. the Ablaze bayonet bases have their prongs significantly farther away from the base tip than an incandescent. This required much more force compressing the socket's springs, and in some cases barely allowed me to twist to lock. In two cases, the LED separated from the base at the point of the color ring (ring stayed with LED plastic). Wonder how far they will compress the springs making any issue in the future using a more normal base alignment.
Last edited:
