Light material vs self illumination

[Ben Kagiki]

Hey team,
Requesting some clairification on what would be ideal to light an led strip around an electronic device. Light material or self illumination?
This is what i got from corona documentation:
1. (self illluniation)Controls the emission property of the material. Useful to create emissive surfaces like LED text, cellphone displays, etc.
2. (light material) The main purpose of the Corona Light Material is to illuminate the scene. The typical use case is light-emitting objects which have different shapes than the ones available in the Corona Light object (e.g. light bulbs, custom-shaped lights, curved LED strips).

[pokoy]

Self illumination is calculated through GI which makes it slower to resolve, while Light mtl uses a more optimized way to calculate. It's almost always better to use Lightmtl. It might not work properly in some cases (using it within a layer mtl can be problematic) but if it works fine in your case, definitely prefer it over self illumination.

[Ben Kagiki]

Thank you for that..let me give it a go

[Beanzvision]

There's also this that might help: https://support.chaos.com/hc/en-us/articles/4528322665745-Should-I-use-Corona-Light-material-or-Self-Illumination-to-illuminate-my-scene-in-Corona-for-3ds-Max-

[maru]

If you want to illuminate other objects with it - use Corona Lights or Light Mtl. (e.g. an LED strip which illuminates toys on a shelf producing dramatic lighting in the scene)
If you just want something to be visible as "bright" in the rendered image and not to cast any strong light - use Self-Illumination. (e.g. an LED strip which is visible just as something glowing in a generally bright scene)