Saber Forum

We have a new blade color option, we call it Arctic Blue.

Here's the vid, short and sweet: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvlAZsoDSBo&hd=1


(http://img839.imageshack.us/img839/2976/bladecollage12511.jpg)

This one looks a lot more movie style, nice idea!

Oooooh Aaaaah. I like it. I'll have to order it some day.

CURSES!!!!!!!!!!!!

until i saw this color on the forums i was so gonna go with Adegan Silver for my next saber. such an awesome color. GAHG with the decisions!!!!

Is that the saber I think it is? ;)

Its......so......BLUE!!! I love it!! I guess the next saber is gonna be an Artic Blue...

Nice color Ultra

AHHHH! I was set on getting Sun Riders Destiny before i seen this! Great color though. It looks amazing.

O_O I want this color so badly!!

This is perfect. I've been wanting a dark liberator and when i got my guardian blue sabers (which i love!) i said it would be cool if they made a lighter blue. Now its here! WOOO!

This looks really cool.  I may have to get this the next time I order a saber.  You guys are the best.  Such great products.

This is so awesome, a lighter blue is perfect!

Can i send in a loose Guardian Blue led module with additional fee in exchange for an Arctic Blue module? My custom saber would appreciate that ;D

can i send in my liberator to get the adegan silver changed to an arctic blue?  what would it cost?

Yeah, I've never liked the Adagen silver on my Oppressor, this is gorgeous! Love the new music, BTW:)

Lovely shade, I'd love to pair it up with my blue dark initiate for dual wielding!

And take some of your awesome pictures with it for us.  ;)

I want an arctic blue saber now! Two Standard Issue battle sabers in arctic blue Starkiller style! :D

That is an absolutely beautiful shade of blue and looks very bright...is it an RGBW mix of blue and white dies or just a particularly pale binned blue LED?

I'm definitely going to want one of these in my next purchase.

edit: oh I just saw the RGB sale...decisions, decisions...Temptation thy name is Ultrasabers...lol

Just for a comparison, here's a shot from one of the films: (http://images1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20090409235816/starwars/images/thumb/6/65/DjemSoAttackStance.jpg/225px-DjemSoAttackStance.jpg)

and heres the ultrasabers

(http://img839.imageshack.us/img839/2976/bladecollage12511.jpg)

It almost makes me regret buying the guardian blue ones, because I can see now how different the color used for them, and Hasbro/MRs as well, looks from parts of the films.

Guardian blue is movie accurate also (Luke on bespin, obi in the cantina, almost all the blue sabers in the prequels), arctic blue just fits some situations better (Luke igniting his saber on tatooine, the picture you posted.). I like this new color!

You're right, now that I look back a bit, the Guardian Blue color is also accurate, just, for some reason, a guardian blue lightsaber seems to show up as arctic blue  at random in the films, (or vice versa?). I can't imagine why that is, but either way, damn do I want one of these lol.

Would this be the same shade as an Adegan Silver with 2 blue light disks in it? I've been comparing and contrasting for the past few minutes, and i feel like they're about the same -brightness, of course

Arctic Blue is much brighter than a silver LED with color disks.  1 color disk alone decreases brightness, that's just the nature of a light filter.  When you are talking about 2...

Arctic Blue is a much brighter and purer option than Silver + color disks.

How noticeable is the green in this color?

It's a light blue.  If you could see green, it wouldn't be blue...

Sweet! New color for me!

Just purchased my first Arctic Blue lightsaber! I cant friggin wait!

Is this color made using a RGB LED, or a single color LED?

RGB

I can't wait until my Anakin Skywalker ROTS stunt arrives in arctic blue. Wednesday is still so far away.

i can't wait till i can have a battle with you and that color
it looks soooo bright not sure if i can handle that kind of brightness :o
but i'm sure gonna try it ;D

Arctic Blue just replace the Sunriders Destiny in the RGB hilts, but I'm having a hard time understanding how. Sunriders was a blue LED and a green LED, and Arctic is(I think) a blue LED and a white LED. But if you're using the green switch on an RGB and get Arctic Blue...then my brain breaks....

Can anyone shed some light on this(Pun totally not intended, but still awesome)?

Asked and answered:

http://www.saberforum.com/index.php?topic=865.0 (http://www.saberforum.com/index.php?topic=865.0)

Why do people think there's a White channel on an Red, Green, Blue led?

I'm as dumbfounded as you. :)

I think they're confused as to how mixing the same two LEDs can produce two distinctly different colors. Doesn't make any sense to me either, but hey, at least I got an answer. Thanks.

Mixing light wavelengths isn't very intuitive. You get alot of variation just by changing the mixure a wee bit.

I think maybe they don't understand how resistors work. Plus the luxeon LEDs had the bin system. I remember being baffled by it all at first.

I'm not sure "mixing" means anything to people if they're not familiar with painting or electronics, or printing, etc.

If you tell them that there are three colors that are on the RGB diode and that arctic blue is 100% (full power) Blue + 100% (full power) Green to make Cyan (arctic blue) maybe they will understand better.

Sun Riders Destiny is 100% Green (full power) + 75% (not sure exact number here) Blue.  That's why it has a greenish tint to it.

If anyone is curious about blue/green color mixing, check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Shades_of_cyan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Shades_of_cyan) .

That page demonstrates the color differences based on how much blue or green you "mix" in.

Based on the chart in the previous posters link I would say that the Arctic blue is Cyan and the Sun Riders Destiny is Aquamarine. If that helps anyone in any way...

Basically an RGB LED is a single large high powered 'pixel' and therefore colour mixing for a RGB LED should be the same as color mixing for computer screen pixels you are looking at right now...

...except that RGB colour pixels are separately controlled digitally within exact 0-255 values for each red/green/blue channel of each pixel on a screen...this has to be done repeatedly 60 times a second or more and with great uniformity across millions of pixels on a screen but video cards can do that because they have multichannel digital microprocessors.

Our sabers are not so fortunate...our hobby's best LED drivers/soundcards regulate voltage and/or current in only a single channel so mixing an RGB saber LED 'pixel' cannot presently be done the way computers or TV does it digitally; instead most RGB colours other than the additive primary or secondary colours would have to be 'analog' mixed with resistance on one or more of the red/blue/green LED dice. This can be done with analog potentiometer dials adjusted by hand until a desired shade is determined by eye and then 'locked down' or the resistance measured and resistors chosen to recreate that shade [which is why no one has ever made a true Viridian saber since it requires peculiar and precise 0-255 RGB values not practically tunable 'by hand' with pot dials]. However because of production 'bin' variations in the dominant wavelengths of LED emitters or dies even using the same resistors may not always produce the exact same colour using analog resistance RGB colour mixing.

Now hopefully we can all be understanding why sabersmiths find RGB mixing a challenge...especially someone like Ultra who builds a lot of sabers and needs his colours to be reliably repeatable from one saber to the next. A colour like Arctic Blue which is a  "100% (full power) Blue + 100% (full power) Green to make Cyan (arctic blue)" should be simpler to get uniformity for than a resistored mix like SRD or VA eh? Even back when SRD was a non-RGB-mixed true cyan emitter Lux III LED [now discontinued by Luxeon] there could sometimes be a slight variation between 'Bin 1' and 'Bin 2' cyan LEDs then used for 'Sunriders Destiny'. Imagine how hard it must be to get reliable uniformity from saber to saber by hand with analog RGB mixing. Maybe someday we'll have easy 3-channel digital 0-255 RGB mixing driver/soundboard solution but until then...

Once you understand the difficulty you can see why sabersmiths inc Ultra deserve R.E.S.P.E.C.T. for offering 'mixed' RGB colours like SRD and why "100 percent" additive-secondary RGB colours like Arctic Blue just makes good business sense for a large volume saber maker.

I'm thinking eventually, they may make the Crystal Focus boards have values you can set (0-255) for the LED drivers for each channel.  Then you could "mix" the colors via the config file.  Hopefully they'll make it 3 or more channels.  I know some of the LEDs have at least 4 different dies in them now.

That would be super-bad-ass.  LoL

Or maybe someone could make multiple channel buck-pucks...

i liked the video. the color is wonderful and maybe the next color i get if i dont go with the RGB first ;)

So, it's a single LED unit....with mutiple LED integrated modules...on multiple different circuilts....with individual controllers...

Ah, my feeling of inadequency whenever I thought about saber smithing. I was wondering where you went.

I can't speak for anyone else, but in my case it is because one of the most used RGB  LEDs are  the 5- and 10-watt LEDEngin RGB  LEDs,  which are actually a 4-die LED coming in either RGBA (Red-Green-Blue-Amber) or in RGBW (Red-Green-Blue-White).
I had simply assumed you guys were shortening down the abbreviation.