Don’t throw away those broken LCD TVs and monitors just yet! This tutorial will show you how you can turn them into a DIY light panel for realistic artificial daylight.
If you have one of those busted LCD TVs or monitors lying around, you can give it a second chance at life. You can actually repurpose it into a DIY light panel to give your photo and video projects some realistic daylight illumination. There’s some tricky dismantling involved, of course, but we’re sure you’ll want to give it a try anyway. Studio lighting can be expensive for beginners, so this can be a cheap but effective option for you.
In the video tutorial below by Matt of DIY Perks YouTube channel, he shows us how to convert these broken LCD TVs and monitors into realistic artificial daylight. He initially suggests using them as realistic daytime illumination to give a refreshing look to dark rooms and hallways. We also think it makes an effective lighting option for both photo and video projects. Watch the video below to see if it’s a weekend project you can do.
All the dismantling. equipping with new LED strips, rewiring, and reassembling are worth it given all the uses you can get out of it. What makes this DIY lighting panel so effective is the technology utilized for the backlight mechanism. These monitors and TVs are equipped with diffusion layers, a Fresnel lens layer, and reflectors that push light further forward. As Matt demonstrated in the video, this technology reduces the light fall off that results from the Inverse Square Law. With this DIY daylight panel, there’s not much difference in the way the objects farther from the light source are illuminated, as compared to a regular LED panel. This results gives the effect of the light source coming from further away, which makes it look convincingly like daylight.
If you’re looking for more cool DIY lighting projects using LED strips, Matt has three more for you here, and even one for DIY studio lights here.
Screenshot image from the video