I don’t understand what all the fuss is about with people these days…. I’ve hacked on just about everything in our house that had any LED’s in them and replaced them all with Blue ones… Actually a lot of things that didn’t have any before now do… Even my new truck has been hacked… replaced all the dash lights, they used to be some funky little bulb, but each has been replaced with ultrabright blue LED’s… EVERYTHING should be blue!!!!!
Here’s an excerpt from an article on Wired
A rare sight only five years ago, blue LEDs now seem to be everywhere: on laptops, DVD players, air ionizers and even toothbrushes. And they have some consumers seeing red.
Product reviews on sites like Epinions.com are peppered with complaints about dazzling blue LEDs.
While red and green LEDs have been available for decades, blue LEDs only became practical in the 1990s. Novelty value has helped make them a popular choice in modern product design.
“Research has shown us that consumers prefer blue LEDs over other colors because it’s a relatively new color and hence makes the product more unique,” said Pamela McCracken, a spokeswoman for Logitech, which uses blue LEDs in several products, including speakers and webcams. “Consumers also feel blue LEDs provide a more high-tech look, and associate the blue LED with high-end products.”
“Blue LEDs had, and maybe still have, that appeal of looking great on a store shelf,” said Brandon Eash, an electrical engineer at Design Continuum, a product design house with offices in Boston, Italy and South Korea.
“They sure looked cool when they were first out,” wrote Norman Li, a technology enthusiast from Chicago, in an e-mail. After buying a PC case in May 2004, Li recalled, “I was actually impressed…. The blue light lit up the entire room.” But by the time he bought his third product with an intense blue indicator, he’d had enough, and taped a piece of cardboard over it.
Blue LEDs really are brighter than their old-fashioned red and green counterparts. Barney O’Meara, vice president of Canadian LED manufacturer The Fox Group, said blue LEDs have at least 20 times the luminous intensity of old-fashioned red and green indicators. O’Meara said his company has developed technology to manufacture low-intensity blue LEDs.
“Blue tends to cause more discomfort and disability glare than other, longer wavelengths,” said Dr. David Sliney, an expert on the harmful effects of bright light sources at the U.S. Army Center for Health Promotion and Preventive Medicine in Maryland.
——-
I’ve even sourced out a supplied via eBay where I can get them for under $.10 each, shipped direct from Japan, China, somewhere…. takes about two weeks but sure beats RipOff Shack’s $3 a pop deal by a long ways. I order a few hundred at a time just so I never run out 
