Color mis-match woes.

The LED gods are against me lately. When I got my new car I put some of my old blue cathodes in along with a number of blue 5mm single LEDs and some blue LED flex strips. Then I decided to order a strip of the blue ribbon LEDs as they would fit in some tight spots. I wired them up a few days ago and they are a much different shade of blue, it made it look just bad so I took it out. I don't know what I'm going to do with the strip now, maybe use it in the house somewhere on it's own.

Now I get to the orange LEDs. A couple of weeks ago I put 2 single orange 5mm in each vent in my car and they aren't nearly as bright as the 2 single blue 5mm I had in my last car. The color is a very nice orange, I really like them, just not bright enough. So I decided to order the orange flex strips (4 of the 2.4" strips), they finally arrive and when I try them out they are a dark yellow color at best, not anywhere near the shade of the single 5mm LEDs. So I read that ImagoX solved this problem with a red sharpie...well I gave up after 10 coats of that and decided to buy some clear orange paint from a hardware store. After 2 coats of that stuff I could see that the color wasn't changing enough and the light output was starting to suffer. I think I'll just get a bunch more 5mm LEDs and load up the vents with those. Now I understand why the tech specs are available for these products, I didn't realize a difference of 20nm could be so significant to the eye!

This isn't a knock against Oznium at all, I didn't expect one type of LED to be any different from a different type in the the same advertised color. I just want others to take this into consideration before mixing LED types of the same color. I really want to get this project done, I think it will look great when I get the colors jiving.

That's what the specs are for. Some colors are brighter than others. Also, if you are a novice at making soldered connections, you might apply too much heat to the area and damage the resistor, which can possibly change the color of the LED slightly, although it would be easier to tell with a cool white LED. When I first started a long time ago, I had that problem, amongst others, including low quality LEDs.

Good info, thanks for posting . I've run into mismatch issues too, didn't even see the tech spec pages you pointed out though, those will certainly help . (Although a few things, like the new chrome LED modules don't have specs up) .
It looks like the yellow 5mm LED has the exact wavelength (590nm) that the orange LED strip has . Odd .

Cooper wrote:

Good info, thanks for posting . I've run into mismatch issues too, didn't even see the tech spec pages you pointed out though, those will certainly help . (Although a few things, like the new chrome LED modules don't have specs up) . It looks like the yellow 5mm LED has the exact wavelength (590nm) that the orange LED strip has . Odd .

http://www.oznium.com/led/tech

I see 590nm and 610nm for the yellow and orange respectively...

No no, the yellow 5mm single LED and the orange LED -strip- . Those two pieces are both listed at 590 .