This is due to 30-50Hz refresh rate of the LED’s. The LEd’s flicker in the camera, because your shutter is in sync with the led’s refresh rate. This is on all gear, any manufacturer, and also in the cars led headlights, house celling / wall lamps, almost everywhere. If your shutter gets close to refresh rate of the light source - you will get flicker.
The trick in studio and stage lights is, that PWM driven lights are pumping at least 1200Hz refresh rate or sometimes crank it up to 25000Hz to avoid any camera flicker and to et smooth color / brightness changes.
So with naked eye - you are not even able to notice this. For us 29FPS is already smooth visually.
LEDs don’t have to flicker. It’s a design choice. There’s a name for this way the LEDs are chained together, controlled, and powered, but it escapes me at the moment. I have other stuff with LEDs that don’t flicker, including other DJ gear.
I heard the same sort of claims about frame-rate effect on games & simulations not making any difference past a certain rate, and then I saw air force research that debunked it, and we have crazy 240hz monitors available now with no-flicker LED backlights. To a naked eye looking forward at it, you can’t see a CRT monitor flickering, either, but your eye/brain system picks it up in other ways, including in your periphery sometimes without you consciously noticing it, contributing to eyestrain, headaches, and even overall fatigue.
There is a trend now for companies selling products with LEDs to move away from these flickering ones, and it’s desirable enough that you can market the feature. We’re not talking about something that you hide away in a pocket or otherwise out of sight, either, but gear that’s sprawled out in front of you for hours at a time. Prime Engine OS is already fatiguing-sounding with its ‘IMD hump’ that occurs with very complicated mid-amplitude content, possibly because it’s not using high quality windowed sinc interpolation and windowed FIR anti-aliasing filters, and Prime gear certainly doesn’t need added visual cues contributing to fatigue when there are ways around it.
Then if you’re saying all LEDs flicker, which I have my doubts about with what I’ve heard from engineers on this matter previously, what is probably the rate that the DJM-800, CDJ-900, MP2015, and many of my other DJ gear’s LEDs are running at? I mean, I’m 100% certain there was no PWM, which is synonymous with class-D and switching power supplies, going on in my Biamp DJ mixers I used to own, and they had LEDs.
At the end of the day, if your camera is good enough you can change the frame rate and stop it flickering, there are loads of articles on websites around how to do this.
It’s certainly not exclusive to InMusic products and certainly not something most electronics companies care about or will spend resource on resolving.
Likely very little, they aren’t bright enough to be damaging your eyes and if you read the article I linked the flashing it’s perceptible to the human eye, hence why you can’t ’see’ them.
I’m not talking about permanent damage, rather eye fatigue, headaches, and overall fatigue. This has been a researched topic having to do with flickering displays and lights.
Just look at the wall or something …. I’m gonna be honest, the LED lights are probably the least fatiguing thing on a DJ unit. Our house is full of LEDs, every single light is, every light in my car, and at work, I don’t walk around with fatigued eyes. It’s a non-issue.
Well, PWM issues are a thing for several people, and rapid-flickering LEDs are certainly not health-beneficial, even if you don’t notice it - I don’t either, but I still care about my eyes, and I am glad that my Macbook (>14kHz MiniLED) and iPad (LCD) are fine, while the new iPhone 17 lineup at least got a new PWM smoothing toggle in the setting.
That being said, I also don’t regard the LEDs in DJ units as hazardous, and the main 7”/10” screens of our inMusic devices are all LCD, so no flicker issues there either. However, for me it seems that the LEDs inMusic devices flicker (cycle) more visibly in several YouTube videos than the ones from our competitor, at least in gear-talks and reviews. Dunno if people just mess up their camera settings or if this a real difference. I keep my fullframes locked at 4k30 with 1/30 exposure (rather than the recommended ‘x2 rule’) which nearly fully eliminates all flickering of the various LEDs in my studio, while allowing lower ISO settings. Exposing as long as you can, even if that slightly increases motion blur, is a great workaround to eliminate or strongly reduce LED banding issues.
Btw, my jackal mask is totally eye and camera friendly, LEDs runs at 8kHz
30fps is meant to be a nicer aesthetic anyway, loads of big Hollywood directors still shoot at that rate as they find 60 to be too ‘digital’
I think Lord of the Rings was shot in 60fps and you can definitely tell.
As far as reviews go, not sure what is going on, only perhaps the competitor demands more production value from the reviewers? I’m sure the big boys don’t have a difference?
I much prefer 30fps over that rather stuttery 25fps, which waaaay too many Youtubers use because of the ‘film look’ which is total bs in my eyes. 30fps is a good compromise, though 60fps can deliever a very nice ‘smooth’ look, especially for technical reviews, unboxings, etc.
Then again, at 60fps you can’t use 1/30 anymore and banding (+ low light performance) often becomes worse. Of course, this depends on the surrounding settings. If I was playing on major festivals and had 100k+ followers (one can only dream), I would simply rig a whole studio with expensive hi-PWM lights, get a ton of f1.4 lenses and record with several Sony A9 cameras, lol.
Lord of the Rings was tried in 48fps and this release does exist (this doubled fps gave hectic scenes and battles a nice quality boost). Sadly, many of the old school people didn’t like it and most cinemas then reverted to the 24fps version. Some habits seem to never change. sighs
Mojaxx had some visible LED cycling in videos about the OG Prime 4, Control One and SC6000 decks, though not as bad as I (wrongly) remembered. But when he placed the Control One next to the Wolfmix, the second one had no visible flickering at all. There were one or two videos, where he explicitly mentioned the LED flickering “… but its just because of my camera, so don’t worry in real life” but I can’t remember which videos.
Remember when the Z9 was released with its electronic only shutter, and the banding on the advert boards at sports events was shocking. I think they took it to a Premier League game for the test shots and people trolled Nikon for months about it.
Couldn’t care less about what led lights are in my dj equipment, it’s these poxy led lights on all these new cars that do my eyes in.
I drive a van for work & sit higher up than most but at night when these cars with fancy led headlights come the opposite way it’s like they’ve got full beams on, I can’t see nout.
driving a normal car and if a SUV is coming opposite, I see nothing.
But for my DJ-Table I have two pretty good Eurolite “LED SLS-30 COB QCL Floor” mounted in top of the roof in the attic and for my GIG equipment I have two “König & Meyer 12295 Music Stand Light Dimmer Light”
…. I’m gonna be honest, the LED lights are probably the least fatiguing thing on a DJ unit. Our house is full of LEDs, every single light is, every light in my car, and at work, I don’t walk around with fatigued eyes. It’s a non-issue.
