LED Guru On InGaN-Based LEDs And The Future

Mayor Quimby writes: "EETimes reports that LED guru Shuji Nakamura predicts White LEDs to overtake the light bulb Mr. Nakamura is an amazing guy who is given substantial credit in the development of blue and white LEDs. Other articles about him can be found here and here. He "works from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., 355 days a year, and says he has never taken a vacation." Also, check out this circuit board found in an LED flashlight that uses a single AA battery. It'll be nice when low cost knockoffs start flooding in from the Far East." I can vouch for the life of white-LED flashlights -- the ones I purchased more than a year ago from Holly Solar are still on their first sets of AA batteries. Not as bright as incandescents, but plenty for lighting up a tent or to keep from stumbling on a trail.

Comments

355?

[Fervent]

355 days a year

Back in MY day, we worked all 365 days of the year.

my experience with LED Lights

[jonnythan]

LED lights certainly have their places. I own a Petzl Tikka headlamp that runs off three AAA batteries. I use this headlamp (along with a Princeton Tec Quest and a premier carbide lamp) for the caving i do here in the Northeast (specifically around the Albany NY area).

Anyway, the LED lamp uses three white LED's and doesn't put off anywhere near the light of the 2-AA princeton tec with a standard bulb. However, by way of comparison, it produces a more disperse light and it will last up to 150 hours on a single set of batteries, compared with 6-8 on the Princeton Tec.

The light is certainly whiter than most anything but maybe a xenon bulb (which uses tons of power). It has virtually no range, though. It lights up a nice hemisphere in front of me for a good 6 feet whereas the carbide and Princeton Tec can send a light several dozen.

I keep thinking that if they made a headlamp that had so many LED's in it that it sucked as much power as the standard bulb, it would be fucking bright indeed.....

Oh yeah, and the Tikka was almost $40 and the Quest was $15.

Thank LEDs for laptops!

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you ever realize there were no laptop computers before LEDs were invented? That's no coincidence. The little green-power-is-on incandescent light sucked too much power and made laptops a worthless concept. Thank LEDs for solving that bottleneck!

All about LEDs

[Peter Lake]

LED museum

Next hurdle - omni-directional LED lighting

[Sodakar]

If you don't have a LED light, go get one - it's compact, durable, extremely bright, and battery life is awesome. Quite enjoyable! I personally love the Photon II, but be sure to read Brock's LED Flashlight Page first, before buying a dud like the NightHawk, which is not bright at all.

Now that I'm done with links - I'll say this - while LED lights are great for directional lighting, they are not good at all for omni-directional lighting. This is because the reflector is housed inside the LED itself, and the light will always be facing the direction of the LED plate.

Now... I wonder how difficult it would be to get that LED plate inside the plastic/resin housing into a shape of a cylinder, and install it in place of a standard tungsten filament? If that is possible, then the LED light will truly be able to replace all lightbulbs... Not just the directional ones.

Hmm, I guess I don't have much to say other than the good links up top, and my hope for tomorrow's LED, household lightbulb. If you experts have something to say about the possibility of the cylindrical LED plate, I'm all ears. I surely don't know if it's possible or not.

Re:This is really for those hard to reach places

[maggard]

Er - couple of facts:

• Incandescent traffic lights get changed out ~every 5 years.
• LED traffic lights last ~15 years.
• LED traffic lights initially cost more but generally pay back in power-savings in 3-5 years.
• LED traffic light manufacturers are corrently operating at capacity to supply the increasing demand for their product.
• Incandescent & LED traffic lights are built to put out about the same amount of light although the LED ones appear brighter. This has to do with the numerous bright-points of a LED-lights vs. the single uniformly bright surface of an incandescent.
• Studies have shown that having folks rely on light-positions is unsafe. It requires too much cognition while the training of ColorA=Stop/ColorB=Go is easy & effective for human brains.
• Traffic signals aren't uniformly laid out in North America. While many are vertically arranged horizontal is popular too. Of the horizontal ones many use red lights on both ends.
• Masking incandescent or shaping LED lights is also becoming popular. I can't recall the shapes but the some lights now use them to indicate the colors (I live a few blocks from a city that does this.)

On a related topic:

• Color-blindness is much more common in men then women.
• It is also much more common in European-stock folks then non-European
• It's most common in Americans of Irish descent although there isn't a correpsonding percentage of color-blind folks in Ireland. It is theorized that perhaps color-blind folks were greater affected during the Potato Famine (unable to distinguish bad potatos) and so selectively left Ireland in greater numbers then interbred in the US.
• Green LED lights use about the same percentage of blue as incandescent green lights.