The new Kato GEVOs have come out since the SD70Aces. I do not have these as I acquired the FVM GEVOs. Does anyone know if the GEVOs have the same yellow lights or did Kato go back to the bright white lights? The FVM lights are not much good either. You can hardly see the ditch lights.
Guys, it's real simple - Kato's light board had one type of LED, so they colored their light pipe to make the actual color what they thought it should be. If you went DCC with the Digitrax board, eccchhh! You could always swap out the LEDs... Fox Valley has blown it from the git-go - or their manufacturer blew it. It's easy enough to replace their LEDs, a bit of filing and all is well. Assuming you realize that they use an LED that is reversed from everyone else's... Neither of these problems is bad enough to make me send a loco back. I just assume this is part of being an N scaler and get on with it.
I did not open the model in order to be able to send it back. So please correct me if I'm wrong. Kato uses blue-white LEDs on the original SD70ACe board, correct? Digitrax uses warm-white LEDs on the DCC board for the SD70ACe, correct? The light looks awful yellow with the original DC board, whereas my C44-9W with original DC board have a much better light color. With the warm-white Digitrax, it must be worse. The light bars are tinted all over, so no chance there. If a blue-white LED is unable to "overpower" the yellow tinted ligh bars, which LED should I swap it for to solve the problem? I don't see a solution, so any help is appreciated. I would like to keep my SD70ACe, but I also don't want to be annoyed by these ugly lights... Why did they try to fix something that was not broken? jpd
Although it depends on the voltage (i.e. the speed you run), my feeling is that the color looks okay on the headlights but awful on the ditchlights. That's because the ditchlights have a longer portion of light-tube, which means more of that filtering for yellow happens. It's not necessarily a stupid mistake to begin with, but it should have been caught and fixed before a production run. That's the real question. Probably to make an extra 50 cents on each loco sold (cheaper LEDs). It would have been fine if they had delivered a product that was satisfactory to the customers, but they failed.
We could always go back to the days when N scale locomotives had grain of wheat bulbs for headlights that lit up the whole body shell like a nuclear reactor having a meltdown.:tb-wink:
