# Looking for best quality LED Christmas lights



## Phaserburn (Sep 2, 2015)

It's time to completely retire my old dying incan light strings. I have been looking online at pre-done strings as well as individual retrofit bulbs (C7 size preferred). From what I've read so far, retrofits are brighter (3 emitters vs 1) generally speaking. Been looking at the ones made by Minleon (a bunch of places sell them).

Question is, I'm trying to get the best quality ones I can, and spending more is ok. Are there any sets or retrofits that use an smd, perhaps? The benefits of retrofits, at expense of greater cost, seems to be that you can replace dead bulbs, change the colors, etc, and customize the length of the string, as well as being brighter. They are also full wave, and each bulb has it's own electronics vs. 1 circuit controls the whole caboodle.

Anyone done any good research on this or have experience?


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## CoveAxe (Sep 2, 2015)

My 8 year old discount LED Christmas lights have yet to get a dead bulb, so I wouldn't be concerned at all about them burning out. They are decently bright for their time. Mine came with the tree so I'm sure you can find quality strings as bright as you'd like if you look around.

They make programmable/addressable RGB christmas lights, so you could change the color of individual bulbs on the fly and do flashing patterns or whatever. If I had to buy a new string now, I'd probably get something like that. They are pretty expensive though (~$130/string of 25).

If you don't care about that, I'd probably just get a new C7 LED string rather than retrofit exactly because the retrofit is going to be more expensive from each bulb having its own circuitry rather than doing it once and then putting the low voltage out on the string (also slightly safer for the end user).

My only definite recommendation would be to make sure that the string is full-wave rectified. The discount lights I have are half-wave and you can definitely notice it when you move your eyes quickly around the tree.


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## Phaserburn (Sep 3, 2015)

Not really looking to go programmable; just want old fashioned non-dimming on. I'm with you on full-wave rectified being mandatory.


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## Phaserburn (Sep 7, 2015)

More opinions needed!


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## PhotonWrangler (Sep 7, 2015)

Any string that comes with an effects controller is generally going to run the LEDs on good quality filtered DC and will thus have little or no strobing or flicker, and many of them have individually addressable LEDs, which opens them up the the possibility of rolling your own controller with an arduino or using a third party controller that will give you lost of options. You can even join your controller to a neighborhood or global network of lights.


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