My 89 SabersQui Gon blade is barely any different to my baselit. Washed out colours and not matching what I see in reviews and images of this and other neopixel sabers

My 89 SabersQui Gon blade is barely any different to my baselit. Washed out colours and not matching what I see in reviews and images of this and other neopixel sabers. I have not messed with the board yet, as I don’t yet have a micro usb cable that fits in the gap. Have people had similar experiences, did I just expect too much?

that’s highly unlikely there’s 100 ish led lights in that blade. try recharging the battery and what kind of battery are you using. you should be using something similar to this.

Keeppower 18650 3.7v 3120mah 15A High Drain PCB Protected Removable Lithium Ion Battery

Base-lit sabers can actually have deeper colors, if they use the deep red and/or deep blue LEDs. I wouldn’t say neopixels look “washed out”, but they might be less “deep”.

There are a few things that can affect the colors though:

  1. If the battery isn’t strong enough, or not charged, the voltage can be low, which means less green and blue.
  2. RGBW blades presents some colors with more white, which can look washed out. Full-saturation colors, like 255,255,0 or 0,0,255 should not be affected by this though.
  3. Some RGBW LEDs have a problem where the blue LED activates the phosphor in the white LED. Blade diffusion makes this problem worse, and it can make blue colors somewhat washed out, as you get some white with it.
  4. Many blade styles uses colors that are not full saturation by design. This can of course look “washed out”, but it’s easy to change the configuration.

Beyond this it comes down to expectations, and it’s notoriously difficult to take good and accurate pictures of lightsabers, so it’s hard to compare what sabers actually look like.

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Thanks, on viewing both side by side through a camera lens I think I had just developed ridiculous expectations. It should have occured to me, I had just never seen any discussion on this phenomenon somehow.