LED research and testing results (and a sale)

Hey everyone,

I've been busy doing some research and testing to find good LED strands out there that don't break the bank. For a few months I have been searching for and testing various LED strands to find a good online LED vendor and quite by accident (through some wireframe purchases) I discovered exactly what I was looking for at Christmas LED's.com. In fact, there is currently a sale going on! I'll get to the sale details shortly, but first I wanted to share my results and recommendations.

I ordered a few different types of LED strands: C9, C6, M5 (i.e. mini lights), and Concaves and put them through their paces*. I tested both the full wave and half wave strands that are offered on the site. To keep this post short I'm omitting the half wave testing results. They did not perform well enough for our purposes (it used only 50% of the programmable range). Half wave lights may be cheaper to buy, but they are not suited for animated displays for reasons beyond the scope of this post. I started off with simple on/off commands, moved onto shimmer and twinkle commands, and then did random twinkle and shimmer followed by ramps-- all of which performed flawlessly. After that I did my intensity testing, and these are the results:

At 75.7%, the lights were full on. Anything higher than 75.7% was indiscernible as being fully on to the human eye. So in a fully dark room, going from any command greater than 75.7% to 100% showed no change.

At 3.3% lights had a glow too small to be seen by the human eye. Anything less than 3.3% was an off command. So in a fully dark room, going from any command less than 3.3% to 0% showed no change.
This result was unexpected, as some LED users, myself included, had trouble last year with LED's glowing even when the board was 'off'. What this means is that the capacitors on the line are providing a large enough load to prevent "phantom on" or "glowing" strands.

The results show that the LED strand has a programmable range from 3.3% - 75.7% which means it uses 72.4% of the total programmable range, and ignores 27.6% of the total programmable range.

The good news is that ramps (fades) were smooth. The LED strands experienced the "seizure effect" that plagued a few other LED strand manufactures I have used. To see an example of LED lights failing to fade, check out my Silent Night song from 2008. The song was programmed with ramps and varying intensity levels, but the lights I had did not perform well. The "seizure effect" is also seen here. With the LED strands I tested from Christmas LED's.com, different intensity levels were possible and it was nice to see that I could have different levels of intensity with these lights that I currently do not have. As a final test I plugged in all of the LED strands together to test whether a chain of lights would result in different behavior for any of the strands. With 10 strands daisy chained together, all the strands behaved perfectly.

My conclusion is that the full wave strands from this vendor are suitable for animated displays so long as you realize that 0% and 100% are relative terms. Again, while cheaper to purchase, the half wave strands I tested should not be used in animated displays due to their difficulty in programming and severely limited programming range. I was impressed with the bright colors all the strands had. The lights, like every other strand we buy, is made in China. However, the construction seemed to be decent, and it appears that they will hold up for years to come. Each strand is checked before shipping to ensure it works properly.

Here's the good news-- Christmas LED's.com not only has excellent customer service, they also have great prices. I paid $30 for a 30 foot strand last year at Sam's Club and a 50 C6 light strand (~24') is currently on sale for $11. I asked the owner of the site, Valerie, how long the sale was going to run, and she told me that the prices were valid through the end of the month. While LED strands will never be as cheap as incandescent strands go for (especially right after Christmas), the LED lights I tested not only work like they should, but you can choose different lengths to suit your display needs. Going "green" just got a lot easier, especially since they are even cheaper now that they are on sale through the end of July!

*Note: All testing was done on a D-Light ACx16 controller using both firmware v1.14 and v1.15Beta, and programming was done with the D-Light Hardware Utility v2.3.0 and Aurora v1.0.68. There were some very small differences in timing between different strands of the same type (e.g. a green and a red strand) that were too small to report individually. While I am pleased with this LED vendor enough to recommend them, I should also note that I do not work for them. Just like my testing with D-Light and Aurora products, I volunteered my time and efforts because I want all of us to have the best information and products available for our displays.

Haha!  Any extra money I have is going to lights, not stock!    No, I think it's more a reflection of my frustration at not finding good LED strands and the relief at finding a site that had them at a good price, and with great customer service.  Val has been nothing but helpful for me.  Until now, this had been a fruitless several month search.  After last year when all my hard work programming ramps was for naught, I decided to find a reliable replacement.  This site is the one I found.