I recently bought an adjustable bed base which has USB ports on both sides. Each port has a bright blue light that illuminates the whole bedroom at night. I don't use them so covered both with black electrical tape. Problem solved. I've had the same problem with several desk lamps that lit up the world with that blue light even when turned off. I returned a couple of those immediately.
But I looked through the reviews for all of the above and the issue wasn't even mentioned. I thought I was one of the few weirdos that care. It's nice to read here that I'm not alone in this. But we have to complain enough to make the manufacturers care.
I hate electrical tape. It becomes sticky after some time, when it starts to smear because it got moved or stopped sticking to the surface.
I bought a set of nail polish and use the black one to paint over the LEDs, it even allows you to control how much you want to cover it, in case you still want to have a bit of light to see if it's on or off.
Other colors can be used to mark pins on breakout boards or cables. It's really useful to have around.
The really nice thing about electrical tape is that has an extremely high ignition tempature, and strong voltage resistance, so can throw it on stuff that gets hot (in either sense) and not worry about it. I use it to block off the annoying LED "backlighting" on my PS5... that gets warm enough that I'd be nervous about some tapes. Also handy for actual electrical stuff, like that one speaker wire that loves to comeout of the terminal on my stereo if I look at it funny. I've had some strips of it for years and have never had problems with "smearing" or adhesion.
I'm not intending to suggest there aren't better solutions than periodically taping & cleaning, but a can of adhesive cleaner stuff will make short work of that mess, worth having.
(The one I use - mainly for barcode etc. stickers with shitty adhesive that doesn't peel off nicely - is by 'Pro Power' which I think is CPC's house brand, so that's not helpful if you're outside the UK.)
I use sticker note tape for these. There are colord variant of it, which comes blue/red/green/yellow. They are tapes, so you can decide how long it is required, while being easily removable without leftover because it is sticker note.
There's a brand on Amazon called LIGHT DIMS that sells differently sized stickers, in both ultra-dim and full-blackout forms, which do _exactly_ what they say on the tin, and it's amazing.
I used the ultra-dim for the (white) temp display on my Dyson fan in my bedroom, and the blackout for the brighter-than-the-sun blue LED on my charger brick. Also used the dim one on a smoke detector because my 5-year-old thought it was watching her or something.
They're absolutely great, and you can even keep a couple in your suitcase and fix horrible lights in hotel rooms or AirBNBs if you're so inclined.
However after a while it became annoying to try to peel the small stickers off the backing, then fumble to center a small sticky thing over the offending LED.
so... I use painters tape. I started with the blue kind, but switched to black. Easy to tear or cut, easy to size. electrical tape isn't sticky enough.
I choose an appropriate number of layers for the problem.
Most lights just need one layer. Sometimes I need to kill the LED directionality to be acceptable. And some indicator lights need to be dim, not off. Think an HDMI switcher where you need to know which port is active, or router port activity lights.
Sometimes I put a second layer when I need less or no light.
Thanks for the information. I have a set of stickers for blocking camera lenses on tablets and phones but never thought to look for LED dimming stickers. Seems a bit obvious now but guess I'm so accustomed to using electrical tape that I never gave thought to another solution.
Something similar: I recently bought a white noise machine for sleeping (a short term fix for noise at night). It has a bright blue LED that also lights up the whole room at night. You're literally for sleeping and you're going to illuminate the whole room with blue light?!
One of the Amazon reviews did mention this. But I always see stupid bright LEDs that people haven't covered with tape so there are probably people sleeping with these on at night.
I think it comes up in at least some product reviews, but where it's glaringly obvious, it doesn't show up in the reviews because people purposely look for products that aren't like that. Buying a TV for my bedroom, one aspect of the search would include looking in the manual and seeing if has a suppressible standby light or checking for a non-aggressive standby light color.
An unrelated example is that, at Target stores in the US, there are these (paper) notebooks/journals/diaries that have writing on the front that label them as such. The designs are really nice, but the labels make it ugly - as many people who chose not to buy the product will say "why do I need it to say journal on the front? I know it's a journal" and "I don't want to use it as a journal... I want to use it as a cookbook!" In this way, the reviews self-select only for people who don't care about the labels.
They should really have antireviews where people can write why they didn't buy the product. It would give sellers some kind of signal that there's an issue with their product or its documentation causing people to avoid it.
I'd love to hear from someone in the consumer electronics business to weigh in on how this happens. Who in the design chain wants LED lights on everything? Probably not engineering--it's more work for them. Probably not the business managers--it adds unnecessary cost to the product. Is it the industrial designers? Do they simply have to have LEDs all over everything? Is it just dogma that everyone follows/accepts: "You have to have an LED light!" How does it happen?
Please do add your own review. It's bizarre that manufacturers think unnecessary lights, and especially bright blue ones, are a good idea. Manufacturers have fallen a bit too much in love with blue leds.
I've got to admit, the desktop cases I got from Fractal Design also use bright blue leds. I didn't think about it until I had guests sleep in that room.
It looks like there is this secret society working hard on making people suffer in a hotel rooms after long trips. Blue TV indicators, white and blue air condition panels, impossible to cover LEDs that are attached to fire detectors.
All of that to make sure the room stays as bright as possible the whole night. I am always impressed with the efficiency of these little, bright, things. In terms of a brightness per cubic meter efficiency.
It seems like it should be a no-brainer that if the light can cast shadows, it's too bright to install in a bedroom. I've started traveling with a roll of electrical tape.
Why is it that manufacturers go for blue or bright white LED indicators? I assume that they are cheap enough that it doesn't matter, but green would probably still be slightly cheaper.
We have a USB charger that cannot be used in a bedroom, not that you should, but it can light up an entire room. Why not just have a tiny green LED? Apple is really good about not using bright LEDs in their product, or really any LED indicators (there might still be one in the magsafe). So why is it that every cheap random fly by night Chinese manufacturer feel the need to add a tiny blue torch to their products?
This is how I remember it: For some time LEDs were red, yellow or green. Power LEDs were almost universally red. You can see this on devices from the homecomputer era (Amigas, Ataris, etc.). I'm not sure if red was chosen for technical reasons (red LEDs have the lowest voltage drop), maybe economical reasons or it was already a convention before LEDs became available.
Anyway, when blue LEDs became feasible they were the epitome of cool and every device had to have them. So in my opinion it was a fashion trend that stuck.
I remember being wowed by the blue power LEDs on VA Linux servers in the early or mid 2000s! Now any stock photo of a server room is covered with blue lights.
Speculation: Perhaps they are trying to distinguish themselves from the "cheaper" products by using the "new" blue LEDs? IIRC the technology for them was figured out much later than green or red, so maybe there is a bit of leftover "futuristic" feel to them.
The last time I saw a blue room-illuminator was on an ancient Belkin Bluetooth dongle. IMO the practice has gone out of style with most name brands (including Apple).
It's basically this, yes. Blue LEDs were such a game-changer that the inventor won a Nobel prize for it. When they became cheap enough to use in consumer electronics, manufacturers went absolutely nuts and put them in everything as a sort of whiz-bang look-what-we-can-do thing. But since everyone did that, they stopped feeling distinctive almost immediately. The only designers still using them for indicators are the ones who can't tell when a fad is over. They're still very important technology for LED light bulbs; white LEDs are blue LEDs with a yellow phosphor.
ETA: I'll add that it takes real time, effort, and crucially taste to get an LED indicator to not be a retina-searing nuisance. You have to be willing to devote time to getting it right, and for someone just trying to pump out cheap units at volume, that's not an easy sell.
> Why is it that manufacturers go for blue or bright white LED indicators?
I don't know but I'm sure allergic to red. I don't understand why so many devices are using red for standby or even to indicate work (I'm looking at you Raspberry Pi).
To me red is "blood" and blood is "bad". Red means error.
Thankfully some devices, like ethernet switches, are using proper colors: green for trafic, orange for "degraded" link (say 100 Mbps on a gigabit switch). I look at the rack and there are tens of LEDs and it's all blue, green, orange. That's correct. Zero red. That's what I expect when everything is working fine.
Orange for standby is acceptable, I guess.
I like blue. Maybe not bright blue but blue is way better than red IMO.
If I see something red, it better be an error: alarm / motion detector / garage door opened / whatever.
For us oldies red is just the normal LED colour since in the 80s this was the only colour that was available. Our alarm clocks, microwave displays, indicator lights and even some watches and calculators used red LEDs :)
Yeah my external HDD has a blue LED that's so ridiculously bright it lights up the whole room and puts a really bright blue spot on the other side of the room.
I tried covering it with a post it (several layers) and after a month I noticed that the yellow colour had whitened completely where the LED is. Probably contains an unhealthy level of UV as well. Yuck.
I tried opening it up to replace the LED but it's clipped somehow. Very hard to open without damaging it.
I have good experience with drilling a small hole in the side of the housing and through the LED. You need to aim well. Its not a good technique for all annoying LEDs.
Because a good number of customer service calls come from people who have a device plugged into a dead outlet. The led at least tells you the device is getting power. It can also indicate whether any internal fuses/breakers have tripped. And many manufacturers blink that one led for error codes and such. They have a purpose, and can generally be blocked by any bit of cheap tape.
That doesn't explain why they're blue - which is a much brighter and more intense LED color then green or red.
The craziest one is the subwoofer my parents bought for their home theater - this is a device you would exclusively use in a darkened room while watching movies...and it has a full size eye-searing 3mm LED to indicate "power on" (it's been electrical taped over for about a decade now).
There was a time when industry did not know how to produce blue or white LEDs, only red, orange, yellow and green ones, so you see, red, orange, yellow or green LEDs are old tech, and consequently not suitable for our magnificent product.
They could make them decaying blue in a white matted plastic rather than piercing your eye and a wall bs. I tape all these useless components on everything I have. They are useless, because people tape them or turn off and then can’t test the outlet power loss anyway.
I wish I lived in a world without marketing idiots so much.
> We have a USB charger that cannot be used in a bedroom, not that you should, but it can light up an entire room.
Had the same issue, thankfully a piece of black duct tape was heavy enough to fix the issue. Really annoying to have a device which is essentially unusable out of the box.
> Apple is really good about not using bright LEDs in their product, or really any LED indicators (there might still be one in the magsafe).
They do have an indicator led on the magsafe plug, which is either amber or green, and is pretty bright but easy to unplug.
The old MBPs also used to have a white but pretty dimmed led "breathing" during sleep, it was quite pretty unless you wanted to sleep then it was annoying. If easy enough to put a thing in front.
I also have a ugreen mini dock with a white led, no idea why. It's a passive dock, if it's plugged in it's on, I don't need to have a reminder.
My guess is that next to zero actual thought goes into the design and production of most items these days. Companies are getting cheaply designed cad files and whacking them onto an assembly line and shitting them out into a shipping container bound for a nameless Amazon sellers page.
Don’t want to dismiss your complaint, but I find mine generally is not even that noticeable considering the main function of the Apple TV is playing media on my tv that lights up the whole room. What annoys you about it?
I haven't had the IR remote complication like the article, but for too-bright-LED purposes, I use different colors of labelmaker tape (Brother TZe type) for different cases:
* need blocking entirely (like on my LaserJet, and a UPS) -- black tape
* too bright, but still need to see, and to differentiate colors (like on one of my living room servers) -- white tape, cut to size with hole punch
* too bright for when i use it in dim lighting, and trying to avoid blue light then (like the ThinkLight on my ThinkPad T520) -- orange or red tape
Some of this tape, I would move to behind the bezels, if I had the device open for service.
Black tape also good for covering up cameras on laptops. If I sometimes use that camera, I make it a strip with a folded-over pull tab, and when I temporarily remove it, I stick it poking up from the top of the bezel as a reminder that the tape is off.
For "hole punch" Pixel cameras in the screen, a hole-punched bit of labelmaker tape works, but IME falls off every few/several months. Secondary purpose: when I have multiple phones, different colors of labelmaker tape color-codes their identities on the screen, to help avoid accidents. (Color-coded cases would be better, but the case series I prefer only comes in black.)
FWIW I bought a set of like 200 small dot stickers of diff colors, barely opaque. They’re perfect. You can stick em on and use the color system you described. Like what teachers use for small crafts and such.
That works. I use labelmaker tape because I love labelmakers, and already have various colors of tape anyway. (White for most, black for more discrete labeling on black electronics, colors for color-coding things like employer-owned WFH equipment, and for rare warning labels for certain IT purposes.)
That sounds a lot more livable than my solution of throwing pajama pants or socks over every LED before I go to bed. My dell laptop power connector and google router are the worst offenders.
Hardly an old thing. My 2017 model supports that just fine, and it's not just a button but a circular slider that goes all the way down to the dash lights being practically off.
I had a 97 Saab 900 turbo with an “airplane mode” button that turned off all the dash lights except for the speedometer. It was actually pretty damn useful.
Nail polish works just about everywhere too, lasts for years (unlike electrical tape, which is excellent temporarily), and is trivial to find. It can take a couple layers, but if you just want to dim it that can be a good thing.
(edit: though I have no idea if it'll let infrared through like this post covers. I luckily haven't had any devices sharing IR windows like that)
LightDims solved the problem of bright and blinking status LEDs in our home, they sell sticker sheets in various colors that dim or completely block the light: https://www.lightdims.com/store.htm
Or just use some mostly-opaque tape, such as masking tape or brown cellulose tape (which is what I remember using on one obnoxious external hard drive many years ago) and add more layers to dim it.
Or use a black permanent marker.
A great many households will already have one or the other of these already.
But I presume that none of these would particularly serve the purpose of the article, allowing infrared signals to pass through. Can’t say I’ve encountered the combination of a bright LED and infrared receiver, myself.
Seconded. I learned about these here a few years ago and have gone through two packages of them. The ability to dim for things you still want to kind of see is very nice, and as another person noted, the pre-cut shapes are more attractive. For example, I use them on the air filter level indicator where I still want to be able to see what it set to but don't want it lighting up the room much at night.
Quality Street were wrapped in opaque paper this year.
TP-Link's TL-WPA4220 powerline extenders (and presumably other models) let you turn off the status LEDs in software (there should be a list of hardware that lets you do this).
I wish they would remember the setting though. I have turned their lights off multiple times but they are currently on. Any blip in power supply (power cut, fuse trip, maintenance work) and they come back so it's like trying to keep a tide at bay.
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But I looked through the reviews for all of the above and the issue wasn't even mentioned. I thought I was one of the few weirdos that care. It's nice to read here that I'm not alone in this. But we have to complain enough to make the manufacturers care.
I bought a set of nail polish and use the black one to paint over the LEDs, it even allows you to control how much you want to cover it, in case you still want to have a bit of light to see if it's on or off.
Other colors can be used to mark pins on breakout boards or cables. It's really useful to have around.
Same. I’ve used aluminum tape to block LEDs, works great.
(The one I use - mainly for barcode etc. stickers with shitty adhesive that doesn't peel off nicely - is by 'Pro Power' which I think is CPC's house brand, so that's not helpful if you're outside the UK.)
Something like these: https://images.app.goo.gl/aCK31v9x8Ea2uE7P6
I used the ultra-dim for the (white) temp display on my Dyson fan in my bedroom, and the blackout for the brighter-than-the-sun blue LED on my charger brick. Also used the dim one on a smoke detector because my 5-year-old thought it was watching her or something.
They're absolutely great, and you can even keep a couple in your suitcase and fix horrible lights in hotel rooms or AirBNBs if you're so inclined.
However after a while it became annoying to try to peel the small stickers off the backing, then fumble to center a small sticky thing over the offending LED.
so... I use painters tape. I started with the blue kind, but switched to black. Easy to tear or cut, easy to size. electrical tape isn't sticky enough.
I choose an appropriate number of layers for the problem.
Most lights just need one layer. Sometimes I need to kill the LED directionality to be acceptable. And some indicator lights need to be dim, not off. Think an HDMI switcher where you need to know which port is active, or router port activity lights.
Sometimes I put a second layer when I need less or no light.
One of the Amazon reviews did mention this. But I always see stupid bright LEDs that people haven't covered with tape so there are probably people sleeping with these on at night.
An unrelated example is that, at Target stores in the US, there are these (paper) notebooks/journals/diaries that have writing on the front that label them as such. The designs are really nice, but the labels make it ugly - as many people who chose not to buy the product will say "why do I need it to say journal on the front? I know it's a journal" and "I don't want to use it as a journal... I want to use it as a cookbook!" In this way, the reviews self-select only for people who don't care about the labels.
They should really have antireviews where people can write why they didn't buy the product. It would give sellers some kind of signal that there's an issue with their product or its documentation causing people to avoid it.
I've got to admit, the desktop cases I got from Fractal Design also use bright blue leds. I didn't think about it until I had guests sleep in that room.
All of that to make sure the room stays as bright as possible the whole night. I am always impressed with the efficiency of these little, bright, things. In terms of a brightness per cubic meter efficiency.
We have a USB charger that cannot be used in a bedroom, not that you should, but it can light up an entire room. Why not just have a tiny green LED? Apple is really good about not using bright LEDs in their product, or really any LED indicators (there might still be one in the magsafe). So why is it that every cheap random fly by night Chinese manufacturer feel the need to add a tiny blue torch to their products?
Anyway, when blue LEDs became feasible they were the epitome of cool and every device had to have them. So in my opinion it was a fashion trend that stuck.
I remember being wowed by the blue power LEDs on VA Linux servers in the early or mid 2000s! Now any stock photo of a server room is covered with blue lights.
The last time I saw a blue room-illuminator was on an ancient Belkin Bluetooth dongle. IMO the practice has gone out of style with most name brands (including Apple).
ETA: I'll add that it takes real time, effort, and crucially taste to get an LED indicator to not be a retina-searing nuisance. You have to be willing to devote time to getting it right, and for someone just trying to pump out cheap units at volume, that's not an easy sell.
I don't know but I'm sure allergic to red. I don't understand why so many devices are using red for standby or even to indicate work (I'm looking at you Raspberry Pi).
To me red is "blood" and blood is "bad". Red means error.
Thankfully some devices, like ethernet switches, are using proper colors: green for trafic, orange for "degraded" link (say 100 Mbps on a gigabit switch). I look at the rack and there are tens of LEDs and it's all blue, green, orange. That's correct. Zero red. That's what I expect when everything is working fine.
Orange for standby is acceptable, I guess.
I like blue. Maybe not bright blue but blue is way better than red IMO.
If I see something red, it better be an error: alarm / motion detector / garage door opened / whatever.
For us oldies red is just the normal LED colour since in the 80s this was the only colour that was available. Our alarm clocks, microwave displays, indicator lights and even some watches and calculators used red LEDs :)
I’m color blind and hate this color choice. Damn near impossible to tell apart. Around 8% of men would agree.
I suppose that colour preferences may be cultural.
I tried covering it with a post it (several layers) and after a month I noticed that the yellow colour had whitened completely where the LED is. Probably contains an unhealthy level of UV as well. Yuck.
I tried opening it up to replace the LED but it's clipped somehow. Very hard to open without damaging it.
The craziest one is the subwoofer my parents bought for their home theater - this is a device you would exclusively use in a darkened room while watching movies...and it has a full size eye-searing 3mm LED to indicate "power on" (it's been electrical taped over for about a decade now).
I agree 1,000% that they're ridiculous though. But the colors are definitely about achieving an up-to-date "look".
I wish I lived in a world without marketing idiots so much.
Had the same issue, thankfully a piece of black duct tape was heavy enough to fix the issue. Really annoying to have a device which is essentially unusable out of the box.
> Apple is really good about not using bright LEDs in their product, or really any LED indicators (there might still be one in the magsafe).
They do have an indicator led on the magsafe plug, which is either amber or green, and is pretty bright but easy to unplug.
The old MBPs also used to have a white but pretty dimmed led "breathing" during sleep, it was quite pretty unless you wanted to sleep then it was annoying. If easy enough to put a thing in front.
I also have a ugreen mini dock with a white led, no idea why. It's a passive dock, if it's plugged in it's on, I don't need to have a reminder.
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* Red: stopped or off (preferably dimmed of completely off)
* Yellow/Amber: startup or error state in which the device needs intervention
* Blue/Green: running properly
this would be redundant as you'd know that the device is running in most cases
But I agree, Apple is good about not annoying you with LEDs.
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* need blocking entirely (like on my LaserJet, and a UPS) -- black tape
* too bright, but still need to see, and to differentiate colors (like on one of my living room servers) -- white tape, cut to size with hole punch
* too bright for when i use it in dim lighting, and trying to avoid blue light then (like the ThinkLight on my ThinkPad T520) -- orange or red tape
Some of this tape, I would move to behind the bezels, if I had the device open for service.
Black tape also good for covering up cameras on laptops. If I sometimes use that camera, I make it a strip with a folded-over pull tab, and when I temporarily remove it, I stick it poking up from the top of the bezel as a reminder that the tape is off.
For "hole punch" Pixel cameras in the screen, a hole-punched bit of labelmaker tape works, but IME falls off every few/several months. Secondary purpose: when I have multiple phones, different colors of labelmaker tape color-codes their identities on the screen, to help avoid accidents. (Color-coded cases would be better, but the case series I prefer only comes in black.)
With all the screens in midern cars, even the minimum brightness is too bright for me driving in the night.it wont let your eyes adapt to the dark.
My last Hyundai had a moon button to turn off screen but that was an exception ithink.
I have driven hours with a cloth over the screen of my skoda octavia in the night.
Please let me turn off the screen for dark night driving, thank you.
(edit: though I have no idea if it'll let infrared through like this post covers. I luckily haven't had any devices sharing IR windows like that)
Now if only I can find a way to disable its annoying on/off chimes.
Because of course they're just on the flat top, where cats like to climb and stand.
Or use a black permanent marker.
A great many households will already have one or the other of these already.
But I presume that none of these would particularly serve the purpose of the article, allowing infrared signals to pass through. Can’t say I’ve encountered the combination of a bright LED and infrared receiver, myself.
I've a USB charger with a blue led so bright permanent marker only dims it, even after several layers it still lights up the room.
TP-Link's TL-WPA4220 powerline extenders (and presumably other models) let you turn off the status LEDs in software (there should be a list of hardware that lets you do this).