The New Hotness

The big price displays at the Mobil station on the corner have always behaved oddly, but these replacements began failing within a week of their installation:

That doesn’t look too bad, until you notice the number of dead LEDs in both red displays.

The south face is in worse shape:

The green LEDs seem to be failing less rapidly than the reds, but I don’t hold out much hope for them.

The previous display had seven-segment digits made of smooth bars, rather than discrete LEDs. This one appeared after the segments failed at what must have been more than full brightness; the red LEDs were distracting by day and blinding by night.

Maybe they got the LEDs from the same folks selling traffic signals to NYS DOT? The signals around here continue to fail the same way, so I suppose DOT doesn’t replace them until somebody enough people complain.