Color saturation / quality of pixels

fmt1962

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Dec 28, 2014
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Forster
Well I am very excited, put together my first two mini trees last night, one with LED strips and one with Pixels (both WS2811) and had a great time playing with them all night.

However I am very disappointed in the colour quality / saturation of the pixels, the strips colours are very intense and pure, but the pixels, colours are relatively indistinct, milky of course given the diffusion lens, however if I say did a yellow to red gradient on the tree, with the strips it is brilliant, with the pixels, it was almost impossible to tell where the colours changed.

I don't know if this purely because of the milky diffusion lens, if so, are the better quality ones? Can you get pixels with clear lenses, am I missing something?

Pixels ordered were
http://www.aliexpress.com/store/product/DC5V-50nodes-WS2811-addreable-LED-pixel-module-pixel-string-IP68-rated-RGB-full-color-256-gray/701799_32225918892.html
(these have Red, White, Black wires in the description, I actually received blue,green,red.... should be the same other than the wire colour I expect)
 

fasteddy

I have C.L.A.P
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Apr 26, 2010
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Albion Park NSW
They should be fairly similar but what may be the case here is that with Ray and other Chinese vendors is that they buy many of their lighting products from the markets or from different manufactures and some of these may be factory seconds. Consistency also varies because in the end you are buying a product that is very cheap and so quality and consistency are part of the trade off. What you will also see is that the intensity of the LEDs may lower over a few seasons because of the grade of LEDs normally used.

Normally for DIY where cost is the most important factor then this is not an issue at all and the savings are worth the risk because at 20 cents a node the price is very cheap so you get what you pay for. They are cheap for a reason.
 

multicast

Senior elf
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Jul 13, 2013
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715
In deed they are cheap for a reason. Its not just color that you need to bin for, its also intensity.


On this point i have to apologize to you. The pixels we build are very tightly binned, which means we have a lot of Led dies that are discarded as seconds. And yeah, they end up for sale in the markets for those people who build stuff for 20c
 

arw01

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Dec 30, 2013
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384
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Eastern Washington
Yep saw the same thing when I started buying Minleon G40 milky globe strings against another "higher" quality product here stateside. Running just an E682 in test mode with Red, Green, Blue I could tell you the difference between a Minleon G40 and a V2 Technicolor until you hit 10-15 feet and then I could not tell them apart. However, I am anxious to get a Minleon strip (2 leds a pixel) to compare against some ws2811 nodes. However the minleon is over 4x the cost per strip.


50 nodes of Minleon runs over 2x a typical Ray string, but at the end of the year when the threads start that out of 800 pixels I only lost 3 modes, and another guy says aw I lost 5 nodes, I'm content in that I lost ZERO nodes, nada, zip, nilch. So while they spend an hour or two hacking up a donor string, fixing their other strings (or just dealing more often with nodes out in the show), I'm content my strings will be around for years and years in this limited time used application!


You might try some TLS3001 nodes in your testing too if your controller can handle them.
 
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