Games By Will Greenwald Apr. 17, 2014 2:56 pm
The DualShock 4 is a fantastic gamepad, but it has one glaring flaw, and I mean literally glaring: the light bar. In Sony’s infinite wisdom the compan decided not to let you turn off or dim the huge glowing light on the top of your PlayStation 4 controller, which means if your HDTV is reflective, or dark, or in any way visible, that blue (or red, green, purple, whatever player you are) light will shine right back at you. If you use the DualShock 4 as a PC gamepad with the DS4Tool program you can customize or turn off the light with no problem, but with a PS4 it will just shine like a freaking lantern.
You can just cover the light bar with electrical tape, but I saw a much more elegant solution at PAX East. Flaming Toast Decals and Graphics makes custom vinyl light bar stickers that darken your gamepad while keeping it classy. You can get simple blackout stickers for $2.25 a pair, but why settle for pure darkness when can turn it into your handle or logo? For $4.25 a pair, you can get a blackout sticker with a clear cutaway of a word/phrase/symbol of your choosing in one of 12 different fonts. You can also get one of 12 geometric and artistic patterns to give your light bar a bit of style without branding, like with zebra stripes or tesselations.
Flaming Toast gave me some samples of the stickers when I visited their booth at PAX East. They’re very nice, and seem to be exactly what Flaming Toast claims them to be. The stickers are precision cut vinyl, with the printed parts completely blocking out the light bar and the clear parts letting the light shine through without tinting or dimming it. They apply easily to the light bar, and they’re thick and small enough that I didn’t have any issues of air bubbles under them when I put them on. The adhesive is enough to hold the decal securely in place on the light bar, but not enough to leave a residue or making applying or re-applying them difficult.
Flaming Toast also claims that the decals don’t get in the way of signing in with the PlayStation camera or using the Playroom. Which is a concern many, many PS4 owners don’t have because the camera is ridiculously unnecessary.
If you want your own custom DualShock 4 decal, you might have to wait a week or two. According to Flaming Toast, the production time for orders is currently nine days. Still, patience might be worth not having a controller gunked up with electrical tape.
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You can just cover the light bar with electrical tape, but I saw a much more elegant solution at PAX East. Flaming Toast Decals and Graphics makes custom vinyl light bar stickers that darken your gamepad while keeping it classy. You can get simple blackout stickers for $2.25 a pair, but why settle for pure darkness when can turn it into your handle or logo? For $4.25 a pair, you can get a blackout sticker with a clear cutaway of a word/phrase/symbol of your choosing in one of 12 different fonts. You can also get one of 12 geometric and artistic patterns to give your light bar a bit of style without branding, like with zebra stripes or tesselations.
Flaming Toast also claims that the decals don’t get in the way of signing in with the PlayStation camera or using the Playroom. Which is a concern many, many PS4 owners don’t have because the camera is ridiculously unnecessary.
If you want your own custom DualShock 4 decal, you might have to wait a week or two. According to Flaming Toast, the production time for orders is currently nine days. Still, patience might be worth not having a controller gunked up with electrical tape.
More...
