Case modification is pretty much mainstream now, everyone is doing it so you should too right? Lighting is one of the more popular aspects of case modding because if it’s dark inside your case you cant see all of the work that you have done. There are many different things which you can use to light up the inside of your computer: neon lights, cold cathodes, LEDs, and EL light tape. What makes EL cable and EL strips so cool is the fact that they are thin, flexible, and can be cut to fit just about anywhere and on anything.
EL Custom Shop is a company which strives to have the highest quality of EL lighting, their products are supposed to be the brightest, highest quality, and best made. In the past the colors being offered were basic. Your options were: A Pink color phosphor that will give off a soft White light and the familiar Blue/Green light that uses a white color phosphor.
The colors they have developed help to break the mold of the simplicity. They do this by changing the power Inverters frequency and have a color overlay add into the laminate to produce a specific color. Currently they offer Red, Yellow, Orange, and Green, Light blue, Dark Blue, Purple, and White. Each of the colors offered are also available in any of these several different widths.
The EL cable is really cool and they take a lot of time to make it of very high quality. The lead wire is soldered by hand to the center conductor of the EL wire and 2 hair thin wires bent over and are also hand soldered to the second conductor lead wire both sealed with heat shrink. This manufacturing approach is labor intensive, extremely time consuming and these solder connections often break causing the wire not to work.
EL Custom Shop strives to have the highest quality, their competitor’s comparable products that does have a middle scribe line is the 7/16″ This only has a lighting surface of 0.19 inches and their middle scribe line is 3 times wider then theirs. Light-Strip delivers over 50% more lighting surface then our competitor’s product as shown on the table below.
The EL Cable comes in a rockin back, it came personalized with my logo and website right on the front. Yours will probably have the name of the company of which you made your order with but it is a really cool touch.
The EL Cable comes with documentation which has some specs, what the kit includes, how to install it, and how to cut it so that you can make smaller pieces. I really like that they included this, even though most of it is pretty self explanatory most people would not know how to cut it and make it still work.
The inverter of the kit is really cool for a few reasons, I like it because it’s smaller than the normal inverter and its insulated very well. I also really like the fact that it has a plug on it so you can use it with a strip or cable or switch between the two.
Both the cable and the strip come wrapped up very neatly so they don’t get damaged and are in one place. You can see at the end of it there is a plug for the inverter which is the cool thing about these. The heatshrink was left off for review purposes, yours will be shrunk.
I hooked the inverter to my computer and the light strip to the inverter and powered it up, it is much brighter than the one that I reviewed from HighSpeed PC and a good thing about the EL Custom brand is I didn’t get shocked like I did with the one from HighSpeed PC. I put it in my computer and it light up the inside of my case pretty well but not bright enough, so I put it into a fan and that looked really cool.
I then unplugged the strip from the inverter and plugged in the cable, again I powered the computer up and it glowed bright. This particular sample I got was not very long but it put it into a fan again and it looked cool, the picture didn’t turn out so good due to my camera. The cable can be used to make your keyboard glow very well which is a possible idea for modding.
Conclusion
After testing this product I must agree with the company that they try very hard to make everything to a very high quality and beat the competition. This EL cable was much better than the one I previously reviewed, it is brighter, thicker, has less of a gap in the middle, the inverter is better, just overall is a much better product. There are only a few bad things about this product, it is not bright enough in my opinion for case lighting, it is more suited for accessories. They also really need to include some switch so that it doesn’t have to be on 24/7. Overall I was very happy with this product and would recommend it to you if you are looking for this kind of lighting. Overall I would give this kit an 8/10, I would really like to thank EL Custom Shop for sending over this product to review and for being so patient.
Pros
- brighter than competition
- Great inverter
- High quality design
- Able to be cut into multiple segments
- inverter swappable with other EL products
- Flexible, small, and thin
Cons
- No switch
- Not bright enough for case