Pinball LEDs have gotten better

[pbj]

I’ve been chasing general illumination gremlins on my WCS 94 for a couple years now.  I finally gave up and jumped two strings together with heavy duty wire under the playfield.  Everything worked, I’m never selling this game anyway, but I could tell it was overloading the circuits.  Bulbs were a little dim and I just kept waiting for something to blow every time I played it.

So, instead of fixing the underlying problem I decided to revisit LEDs.  $25 gets you 100 shipped now from China, and they look an awful lot like what “well known” vendors sell in the US.  I haven’t done business with any of them so have no comments on their domestic product, but I’ve been quite pleased with what I received.

So, I bought 100 47s and 100 555s.  World Cup seems to actually need about 20 47s and 120 555s but I got all the general illumination replaced and the vast majority of the feature lights.  I used “warm white” for everything.

In the photo, you see some flashlight effect in the back box.  It’s not as noticeable to the naked eye.

I’m liking the overall look.  Inserts fully light up and are much easier to see and read during a game now. 

Playfield has a much more clean and modern look.  You can make out the back of the playfield a lot better now.

It’s a little obnoxious during light shows, but not overwhelming,  Flashers and such are still incandescent mostly because I got cheap.  This game is supposed to not have any issues with ghosting or flickering leds and I haven’t noticed anything too bad on those lines.  I’ve got so many 47s left over I’m going to play with them on my older games and see how it goes.

 

[pbj]

Here’s the ones I bought, from some guy called Gearuis.






https://www.aliexpress.com/item/3256801781288828.html?spm=a2g0o.productlist.0.0.4dfc4c4cyOfCJJ&algo_pvid=f624baec-3dcd-446f-945e-c8e15994d757&algo_exp_id=f624baec-3dcd-446f-945e-c8e15994d757-3&pdp_ext_f=%7B%22sku_id%22%3A%2212000018261911410%22%7D&pdp_npi=2%40dis%21USD%21%2122.12%21%21%21%21%21%402103255b16586359020443785e872c%2112000018261911410%21sea

[pbj]

I put some of the 47s in my EM.



You can see the burn marks on the central bottom middle plastic from the old bulbs.  All Suspense machines are burned here.  I left the painted red incandescent bulbs on the sides and in the middle.  All other general illumination, inserts and pop bumper lights are LED.  I’m quite impressed with the similarity to incandescent.

I was a little embarrassed, too.  I’ve had this machine for ~20 years and half the bulbs were silvered and running way too hot.  Next step will be the back box.

 

[Mike A]

They look good in pics.

I always want to keep things as original as possible.

But with pins it seems that LED illumination solves a bunch of problems.

It looks like you found LEDs that are close to original.

I have seen too many pins outfitted with LEDs so bright that you have to wear dark sunglasses or go blind.

You did a nice job and those LEDs will help keep those pins running.

[chopperthedog]

I've tried to do the above play field GI stuff in leds and can't do it. Just something about that tungsten glow and natural hard shadows. The peripheral artifacts I see with led's is something I can't unsee, kinda like during x-mas and a house is lit up with led's and as you look away you can notice the hrz flicker. With scanning a play field that's led'd I see that same flicker. Back box, pop bumpers, under play field stuff doesn't catch my eye like the above general illumination does. Has that tech been improved upon in last 5 years?


good day.

[pbj]

Chopper, the LEDs seemed to be the usual LED with an inline resistor design we've seen before.  I didn't crack open any of them to see if they're more complicated.  I've got a couple uninstalled, I'll try to pry it apart and take a deeper look.

I know exactly the strobing effect you're talking about.  The first machine (No Fear) I saw converted to LED about a decade ago gave me a headache from the flickering.  I will be honest and admit that I started seeing the faint strobing in World Cup Soccer feature lights around the time I had the string over to ~60% LED (I did them one by one with the machine on).  I don't really notice it until a bunch of them are lit, and that only happens in attract mode.  It's livable for me.

No issues with the general illumination, but WCS 94 is known to be a machine that doesn't have problems with LED.

The lights look fine in my EM.  I actually took a paint marker to some of the lights and it did a great job of giving me that red tint I liked.

I haven't fully converted Alien Poker and Firepower, but what's been switched over looks good so far.