Yellow Legion

[Ziran Le]

AEON is in Adegan Silver with a Rosco Canary Yellow filter. It is very bright and vivid. The picture is actually toned down. In real life it's crazy bright.

Hey Rich, inspired by that photo I ordered a Rosco swatchbook which should be here tomorrow.  I really love that canary yellow color!  I picked up a grab bag Liberator in AS and I'd love to try that canary color.

Does your Aeon run on standard battery setup (AAA), or Li-Ion?  It looks really bright, so I'm thinking Li-Ion.

[richmbailey]

Hey Rich, inspired by that photo I ordered a Rosco swatchbook which should be here tomorrow.  I really love that canary yellow color!  I picked up a grab bag Liberator in AS and I'd love to try that canary color.

Does your Aeon run on standard battery setup (AAA), or Li-Ion?  It looks really bright, so I'm thinking Li-Ion.

Standard power setup. And it is really bright. The Rosco's are really cool. I cut a small square piece and folder the corners in. This helps keep the filter flush against the LED and not slide around up the side of the blade/blade plug.

[Ziran Le]

Oh wow, cool.  While waiting for my Roscos to come in I have been using the discs that US sells.  The color of the yellow disc isn't too bad (a little lemony) but it seems really dim to me.  It looks ok in total darkness, but if youre in a partially lit room you can barely tell that the blade is on at all.

I'm considering sending this Liberator back to US to have them convert it to Li-Ion because it's so dim.  Maybe I should wait and try the Rosco first.

[richmbailey]

Try the Rosco first, make sure you have fresh batteries in place. If it still seems dim, then maybe the Li-Ion is the next step. Mine is plenty bright with the regular AA's.

[Ziran Le]

I've been using rechargeable AAA 1800mah batteries and haven't been impressed with them.  Fairly bright at first, but seem to run down fairly quickly.  Good thing is my charger holds 8 batteries and I have 24 of them total, haha.

Yeah, I'm hoping that the Rosco filters are brighter because I'm liking yellow and orange a lot right now and I understand that both of them can look dim in comparison to GB, CG and BR.

Standard blade youre using, not UE?

[Prowl 1701]

Oh wow, cool.  While waiting for my Roscos to come in I have been using the discs that US sells.  The color of the yellow disc isn't too bad (a little lemony) but it seems really dim to me.  It looks ok in total darkness, but if youre in a partially lit room you can barely tell that the blade is on at all.

I'm considering sending this Liberator back to US to have them convert it to Li-Ion because it's so dim.  Maybe I should wait and try the Rosco first.

To be honest, I have several sabers in standard setup and several with the lithium set up and the sabers look about the same in brightness to me.  My standard sabers look as bright as the lithium sabers, I've never noticed a difference in the brightness really.  I make it a point to get standard on all of my stunt sabers now to save money.

[richmbailey]

I've been using rechargeable AAA 1800mah batteries and haven't been impressed with them.  Fairly bright at first, but seem to run down fairly quickly.  Good thing is my charger holds 8 batteries and I have 24 of them total, haha.

Yeah, I'm hoping that the Rosco filters are brighter because I'm liking yellow and orange a lot right now and I understand that both of them can look dim in comparison to GB, CG and BR.

Standard blade youre using, not UE?

Standard blade indeed. I also have a Rosco purple filter in my Dark Monarch with the Li-Ion power setup and it doesn't seem any brighter than the my AEON stunt with standard power. Actually the yellow appears much more bright than the purple.

[Ziran Le]

Really?  That's wild. 

Maybe it's just the difference in brightness between colors? 

My Prophecy is in GB with Li-Ion and it's so darned bright that when I swing it on the driveway at night, it blinds me a little and leaves blue "tracers" in my vision.  It's almost too much, but def looks like a lightsaber.  When I swing this Liberator in AS, filtered with either yellow or orange (single filter disc, not stacked) under the same conditions it's nice, doesn't affect my vision so much and is good for practice in the dark...but it looks like a lit up, plastic tube, haha.  Now, my son's Dom V2 LE is in Blazing Red with a standard battery setup, but with 4XAAA, and it's so bright it's scary!

I'm not really complaining per se, but I was surprised at how much more dim the filtered AS looks and thought the Li-Ion might be a good option.  I'll try out the Roscos and practice with them for a while.  Now that I have more than one saber I can have them in different configurations for different uses.

I got to thinking, it could also be that this particular shade of yellow is just pale.  Perhaps when I am able to make a darker, more rich yellow it will appear brighter to me?

[Molina00]

To be honest, I have several sabers in standard setup and several with the lithium set up and the sabers look about the same in brightness to me.  My standard sabers look as bright as the lithium sabers, I've never noticed a difference in the brightness really.  I make it a point to get standard on all of my stunt sabers now to save money.

Same here.  I haven't noticed much difference, if any, between my stunt and sound sabers.
Going standard on stunts really makes sense too since the LED's don't need 7.4V of power.  My understanding is with that much they have to be resistored or a buckpuck setup to keep the voltage from blowing the LED's.  It's just the soundboard that needs the extra power.    
I'm going to have to remember that when I order stunt sabers, although I think Li-Ion is required with a stunt Emerald saber.

[Ziran Le]

So weird.  I hadn't even thought of getting input from people about the difference in brightness between Li-Ion and Standard AAA.  I have 3 sabers with Standard setup right here in my office and there's no comparison between the 3.  This filtered AS Liberator doesn't even look like it's playing the same game as the BR Dominix and the VA Aeon.

This Lib was a grab bag; possible that it has an older, less powerful LED in it?

[Karmack]

the biggest difference with a stunt with Li-Ion is that the buck-puck keeps the power even so there is no "fade".  My daughter's Initiate V3 has a standard setup and is VA, when the batteries start to die the blade color fades to darker violet, then eventually red.  It is also not as bright (the batteries are nearly dead when it gets to red anyway).

My stunt Dominix V3 has Li-Ion/buck-puck (in the hopes that it will one day have a sound card installed) and it looks exactly the same right up to the moment that it snaps off.  Which freaked me out the first time it did it.  Just ... off.  

At full power, her sabers are very bright.  No noticable difference in intensity.

Ziran, from what I've read and seen, the disks actually block a lot of the LED's intensity.  The Rosco filters will no doubt be much brighter.  I use Lee filters, but the effect is the same.  I also find that light colored filters (like that canary yellow) tend to be brighter, because you're letting through more light to make the color and only filtering a narrow part of the light spectrum.  The darker or more "narrow" the color is, the less light will get through and the dimmer the overall blade effect will be.  So yellow is a great "filter" color.  Deep reds or dark blues/purples are not going to come through as well.

Still, once you get the book, experiment.  We took our Lee swatchbook and just put the swatches in front of the LED with the blade pressed against the filter to catch the light and tried most of them.  :-)  You will find a few you really like, make those into insertable filters as richmbaily described, or what I did was cut them in octagon shapes to fit in the "barrel" of the emitter.  Just make sure they go down flat between the bottom of the blade and the LED and the color will be good.

[Prowl 1701]

So weird.  I hadn't even thought of getting input from people about the difference in brightness between Li-Ion and Standard AAA.  I have 3 sabers with Standard setup right here in my office and there's no comparison between the 3.  This filtered AS Liberator doesn't even look like it's playing the same game as the BR Dominix and the VA Aeon.

This Lib was a grab bag; possible that it has an older, less powerful LED in it?

That's why I mentioned it, I didn't think you had considered asking about the difference in brightness.  As you mentioned before, I think some colors just look brighter than others, the standard colors like BR, and GB seem brighter than the mixed colors like VA to me. I don't have an AS saber so i can't say how bright it is.  But my  stunt Dominix in GB with lithium setup and my stunt DSI in GB with the standard set up look the same to me.

[Ziran Le]

Yeah, I've seen the VA do that fade out thing where it gets darker.  It's kinda neat to watch.  I put in some rechargeables and just left it sitting on my desk, turned on while I was working and watched it fade out to a weak red before winking out.  I had read somewhere that the red LED has a different voltage requirement or something and that it took less power to operate it?  Something like that.

So, is AS a "blended" LED color?  I know that RGB are standard colors, but are all of the other LEDs blended?

[Karmack]

I think many of them are.  I'm pretty sure Fire Orange is actually straight Amber.  The "solo" LEDs that I know of are White, Amber, Green, Blue, Red.  Based on playing around with my RBG Bellicose, the Arctic Blue appears to be B+G, but it could be B+W, hard to say.  :-)  Yellow is R+G.  Purples/pinks are R+B in various intensities. 

So GB, BR, CG, FO and presumably AS would all be single-color LEDs, and the other colors are all mixes.

[Ziran Le]

Ah, I forgot about the amber LED color.  I was wondering if there were only RGB and that everything else was a blend of some kind.  Certain colors are clearly blends such as the purples, SRD, AB and such, but I didn't know whether they had straight orange or yellow LEDs to use for those colors.

Thx fellas.  We'll see what happens.