Shiji Lighting LED Pixel Lights

Hello all. I'm new to the forum and was hoping to get some feedback on a vendor that I've been in contact with quite a bit over the past few months. I'm in the process of creating an illuminated night walk and have thus far been impressed with Shiji's customer service as well as their products. We've ordered quite a few samples and everything looks great. However, I'm hesitant to pull the trigger on a full order without some additional knowledge that can speak to the reliability of their products. Specifically, I've placed a small sample order and have received their UCS7604 24V LED light balls, par lights, GS8208 12V pixel lights, and WS2815 12V flexible neon led silicon strips. Honestly, as I mentioned, I'm really just looking to make sure their products, generally, will be reliable and last year after year, but if you have specifics you'd like to share on any of these products or others and your overall experience dealing with Shiji, it would be much appreciated. THANKS!

I have purchased GS8208 12V pixel lights from Shiji several times now, every year since 2021. I documented some of that journey here:

In some Shiji orders I have received a small number of defective strings or poor quality strings, which I tell the manufacturer about and they agree to remake them. By defective I mean straight away the string does not fully work e.g. one or more pixel out or colour missing or failing to pass data to next string. And by poor quality I mean insufficient epoxy with exposed pcb so not waterproof. To save on extra shipping fees I have the replacements made at the same time as my next order (usually a year later).

I always over order to allow for some spares in case of failure and this has covered for defects on arrival without being short of pixels. The number of failures I have experienced that were not already present during initial testing upon delivery I think I could count on one hand. Failures have typically been one pixel losing a colour (which due to the IC design that pixel stays dull rather than emit the wrong colour at normal brightness). In one case a pixel was adding a colour, and by this I mean when it was supposed to be green it was yellow, when it should be red it was still yellow, but white or blue was fine. This particular issue started about halfway through the second season of using that particular string of GS8208.

For WS2815 I do use some regular 30LED per metre strip but these were bought from a random AliExpress store and not Shiji. WS2815 lacks gamma correction so colour blending (in my experience) looks different when compared to GS8208. My findings for this you can read about here.