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- Attack From Mars
Is anyone other than me bothered by the flashing of segmented displays? It is like a horizontal black line that rolls down through the display from top to bottom like in the following screenshot. I don't know how difficult it would be for @ravarcade to change it but I wish there was a way to turn this off.
I found a video of someone repairing a Bally display and you can see it pulse a bit but it doesn't look like the above. To see the display, you have to advance the video to 18:05 minutes. The display blinks in the video but you can see the pulse when the display is lit.
I found another video of a display that is not on a pinball table but the same type where the author says the flicker is caused by a strobe effect where the display blinks at 4 frames per second which the eye cannot see and interacts with the frame rate of the camera. ...So in reality, gas segmented displays don't actually appear to flicker to the human eye when not shot by a camera.
My point of all this discussion is that real gas segmented displays don't appear to blink on and off at all. They are like fluorescent lights that blink on and off so fast that you can't tell they are blinking. Recording a video of a gas segmented display sets up a strobe effect that makes the blink appear to slow down. For those that watch old Western movies that have horse drawn carriages, you might have noticed that the wheels on a carriage have times when they appear to rotate backwards. It is because of the strobe effect of the camera on the wheels.
I found a video of someone repairing a Bally display and you can see it pulse a bit but it doesn't look like the above. To see the display, you have to advance the video to 18:05 minutes. The display blinks in the video but you can see the pulse when the display is lit.
I found another video of a display that is not on a pinball table but the same type where the author says the flicker is caused by a strobe effect where the display blinks at 4 frames per second which the eye cannot see and interacts with the frame rate of the camera. ...So in reality, gas segmented displays don't actually appear to flicker to the human eye when not shot by a camera.
My point of all this discussion is that real gas segmented displays don't appear to blink on and off at all. They are like fluorescent lights that blink on and off so fast that you can't tell they are blinking. Recording a video of a gas segmented display sets up a strobe effect that makes the blink appear to slow down. For those that watch old Western movies that have horse drawn carriages, you might have noticed that the wheels on a carriage have times when they appear to rotate backwards. It is because of the strobe effect of the camera on the wheels.