LEDs vs. Lightbulbs

zymano writes "www.technologyreview.com has this nice article on LEDs vs lightbulbs" Follows the exploits of one Shuji Nakamura, the same man who brought you the practical violet laser.

Comments

Re:A long way to go...

[theedge318]

While you are correct that fluorescent bulbs are much more efficient, they serve a considerably different purpose. Fluorescent bulbs provide great omni-directional lighting. Unfortunately they produce some unwanted spectrums, namely don't store wine under anything but an incandescent bulb. Anyways LED provide a very tight cone of light. This means that they are perfectly suited for flashlights, traffic lights, and headlights, where we are looking for a cone of light that only represents 1/100th of the sphere. A fluorescent bulb may be 3 time more efficient, but it does so in directions that need to be reflected into the correct direction, a process that is only 10-20% efficient.

What does this mean ... you won't be replacing your household lamps with LEDs anytime soon (if ever) ... but flashlights, traffic lights, headlights, and other similar lights will all begin to make use of LED technology.

Re:On the road

[bill_mcgonigle]

500 LEDs peering back instead of a large bulb

And the best benefit - when an LED fails you have 499 LED's instead of traffic accidents. :)