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A Super-Efficient Light Bulb
Chroniton writes with news of a Silicon Valley company, Luxim, that has developed a tiny, full-spectrum light bulb, based on a plasma of argon gas, that gives off as much light as a streetlight while using less power. The Tic Tac-sized bulb operates at temperatures up to 6000K and produces 140 lumens/watt, almost ten times as efficient as standard incandescent lamps, and twice the efficiency of high-end LEDs. The new bulbs also have a lifetime of 20,000 hours. There's no mention of mercury or other heavy metals, which pose a problem for compact fluorescents.
but can I use it in a grow-op?
Great, people lighting their properties with more bright lights is just what we need. Light pollution is already a serious probably (it's destroyed amateur astronmy, see Mizon's Light Pollution ). Instead of showing people how they can make do with less lights, we're just making it cheaper for private individuals to duplicate the Las Vegas strip.
Such high operating temperatures would not be acceptable for domestic use - the risk of fire would simply be too great. But commercial use, specifically for streetlights as the summary mentions, would be ideal. The amount of power consumed by streetlights world-wide must be staggering, so any improvement in efficiency, even in just this single area of light generation, would be substantial.
Better known as 318230.
Does that mean - it gives off Xray and gamma ray?
cancerous while stay indoor?
So...how much does it cost compared to an incandescent? Or an LED?
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
I found it interesting that the tiny bulb - at least in the video - was still using 250 watts and internally generated a temperature of 6000K (no they weren't talking color temp; they were talking actual temp). Now that's certainly lower than the 400 watt conventional streetlight they compared it to; but there's no mention in the video about scalability or low-power use. So the submitter's comment about it having advantages over compact fluorescents may have no basis in fact.
#DeleteChrome
I went to the link, but it was just an obnoxious video ad. And no, I didn't sit through it.
I know that a lot of the stories on here are ads in disguise, but this one isn't even hiding. I didn't realize that slashdot was an a linking to unabashed ads now.
The company makes many different forms of lighting including projectors http://www.luxim.com/ A home projector with 10 times the bulb life would let me watch just that much more porn in my mom's basement.......
In Soviet Russia, 6000K burns you! Oh, wait...
Thats a bright idea.
http://www.fullspectrumsolutions.com/cri_explained.htm
Provides a table of other light sources for comparison and a bit of discussion about color theory.but to answer your point, yes a six thousand degree F bulb would be impractical for home use.
does anyone have this problem? there's really no content there, when the video doesn't play.
music - http://www.subatomicglue.com
The "nasty police helicopters" link is no bueno. No clicking!
It goes from God, to Jerry, to me.
I realize that for some reason, lighting technology punches one of my geek buttons. I was super-pumped about white LED technology, and this just blew me away. The bulb was the size of a Jelly-Belly jelly bean, and it out-shone a street lamp fixture the size of a jumbo hot-dog while burning a whole lot less power. How gee-whiz is that?
At 6000K, though, it's not going to be in my living room, but I'll be really happy to see this in street lamps. And it looks like the parts are going to cost pennies per unit. I love lighting technology. What a super-geek I am!
-FL
But isn't 20,000 hours only a little more than 2 years?
365 * 24 == 8760
20,000 / 8760 == 2.283
Is that right, or am I way off?
.
== WolfriderV6 == I'm willing to admit that *I just might* be wrong... Are you??
> Such high operating temperatures would not be acceptable for domestic use
> - the risk of fire would simply be too great.
Don't be silly. 6000K is the internal temperature of the gas. The filament in an incandescent lamp can reach 3000K. What matters is the external temperature, which is likely to be lower for a more efficient lamp.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Ah, some good news. We need more of that.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Taken in the context of some of the other posts, I have trouble believing their claim. If the product was that good, they would make it for general use not just video projectors. If the product was that good, it would be a real breakthrough because it beats LEDs by around 40%.
With an operating temperature of 6000k how many do I need to heat my house? Could a central array of these bulbs combined with optical fibers provide all my heating/lighting needs and still achieve power savings?
Perfect for my indoor marijuana plantation.... :-)
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
This article repeats the 6000K figure for the Luxim device's operating temperature, which seems a bit toasty for widespread consumer adoption.
Most incandescents and CFLs operate at half this temperature.
LED-based lighting is safer and far more efficient than the Luxim device.
If the Government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law;
While these seem like they have a lot of promise for making great leaps when it comes to efficiently generating light, I don't think they scale downwards very well. Yes, a 250 watt one of these makes the same amount of light in lumens that it takes 500, 1000 watts or more for other efficient bulbs to make. The good news here is that this technology makes a case for for the lumens per watt crown. The thing is that you are still using 250 watts. If you don't need say 35,000 lumens to read by, I don't think you can make the technology work at say 25 watts. Maybe you can make a 500 watt one if you need more, but I suspect there is a floor that these things need to operate. Maybe someone can straighten me out if I am wrong.
Full spectrum with an Ar plasma at 6000K ~= 0.5 eV? Yes, you can get a lot of light out of it and it looks white, but I wouldn't call it a full spectrum. There are mostly peaks in the region 900-1500 (I don't have a spectra right in front of me right now, so from memory). But I could be wrong of course.
...but do road accidents go UP?
Why would we need street lights with a very strong light source using the same spectrum as the sun? What about putting one of these into a beamer instead? Or stadium lights? Every time somebody comes up with a great invention, they seem to want to use it for the weirdest things. Bright sun-light lite disturbs the wildlife anyway, bad idea...
1. Scalability - will it scale for use in domestic lighting?
:)
2. Color temperature - will it do warm white or something similarly pleasant?
3. Argon... isn't that toxic? (since the summary mentioned hazardous materials but didn't point that out, high school chem is so long ago..)
4. Price if none of the above are problematic
5. Time to market.
If someone can answer those, I'll be genuinely interested
I have spoken'eth.
Full spectrum high efficiency lights would be a major boon to the pot.... I mean industrial hemp growers.
Sounds like the company has $40 million in funding. So one bulb costs $40 million.
One of the problems of current LED and other low-energy bulbs is that they're no good for indoor cultivation of plants. Using lights which require less power and produce less heat are less detectable than regular indoor grow lights. I wonder if these lights are the answer?
A 250w street lamp is great but can a 30w version be created to compete with a 100w incandescent/40w compact florescent bulb?
Just curious to know if this is something that doesn't work unless you run it really high.
I now wait for news stories about children swallowing on of the bulbs or the video on YouTube of someone shooting a powered up bulb with a gun.
Now if we just replace the argon with trilithium isotopes and turn that magnetic "puck" into some form of rail-gun, we'll have plasma torpedoes!
OK, so plasma is not very close to an ideal black body, but regardless you still get some wide spectrum emissions with a peak near that of a corresponding black body. In this case (6000 Kelvin), that's a pretty nice white.
This would be great tech for growing a room full of the ganja. Full spectrum light, low power, made in California? Come on... thats what they designed it for!
Color flashing, thunder crashing, dynamite machines.
A few points, inspired by those "insightful" comments i read till up to now
a) Temperature=!heat=!"OMG IT WILL KILL US!!!". You dont really want to know the "temperature" of the electron beam in your old style TV... (yeah, i know its not in thermodynamical equilibrium, and thus temperature is not defined, thus the "")
b) This is nothing really new. It is based on the same principle like the old sulfure-plasma lamps in the early 90s.
c) It doesnt scale down well. It needs its power provided by microwaves, which is not efficiently possible in the lower power range.
d) Yeah, it uses 250W. But provides as much light as a 1500W halogen thrower. Wake up, moms basement (which you are most familiar with) isnt the world, there are plenty of things you would like to have 10ks of lumens for.
e) Reinforced from d: Yeah, a 250W bulb can be energy efficent. Because it puts out a fucking lot light, numbnut.
f) Doesnt compare at all with leds: Leds have low surface brightness, are effiecent and dont scale UP well. This things have a very high surface brightness, are efficient and dont scape DOWN well. Apple, meet orange.
g) A better comparison would be vs HID: there they are supperior (longer lifetime, less dangerous, not much more complex driver (HIDs need a high-voltage ballast, too).
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
I'll believe it when I get burned by it. 6000K. What the heck are they even making it out of?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
This thing is only 2/3rds that efficient.
I know everyone hates sodium vapor lamps, but this does show that this lamp isn't a revolution.
And additionally, the mercury stuff about CFs is horseshit. A CF, even if broken releases less mercury into the environment that the mercury released by burning coal to run an incandescent lamp for its lifetime.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
There must be two dozen posts here already blathering about 6000K and nobody bothered to go read the company's official documentation? Here's their website, here are a whole bunch of specs and videos, now go read something before speculating.
However, their light, much like the light of this light, looks an awful lot like the light from a welder. You have to be careful about the pursuit of the almighty lumen -- it's a human-tweaked measure, not a physical measure, and lights score best by dumping all of their light into green. We probably don't want our homes to be lit by exclusively green light.
One thing to note is that there is wide spectrum (true 6000K, this new light), wide spectrum (white LEDs, a relatively smooth blob in the optical frequencies), and wide spectrum (a strategically chosen selection single frequencies, in fluorescent lights). This new bulb should produce very nice looking like, but it might benefit from some of the same phosphors used in white LEDs to down-convert the higher frequencies.
Properly run LEDs are claimed to have lifetimes in the range of 70,000 to 100,000 hours of use, and are not affected by rapid cycling (in fact, the recommended method for dimming them is to switch them on and off very quickly).
make one of these for my motorcycle headlight? And make another for my brake/tail light, slightly less intense and red of course.
Sure.
I guess.
But that doesn't mean anybody with a trophy home actually wants to do it.
Have you ever driven through an affluent part of town and seen the yards which have floodlit trees?
Yep, that's right: they think everybody wants to admire the trees in their yard, so they install powerful floodlights at the base of them, shining up into the foliage. And up into the sky.
Do you really think somebody who thinks that way would willingly curb the light pollution they generate?
It's not just about the effect on astronomy...I don't want their fucking idiocy depriving me of quality sleep because the inside of my house is lit up like a goddam cruiseliner.
We have a very efficient source of full spectrum light. People should be very excited. There are very definitely a market for these if they are as efficient as claimed. We can compare them to any source of white light.
If you do want to compare them to HID, http://www.powersavingsolution.com/hid-lamps.htm they still seem pretty efficient.
I wish people would challenge memes like these, because they're mostly bullshit crafted to stir up/reinforce discontent, in this case by the right-wing noise machine against "environmentalists", because that sells newspapers. /. post) are there for the hyper-paranoid, and apply just as much to the regular old-school fluorescent tubes (moreso, since they contain more mercury).
CFLs, like all fluorescent lights, do contain a miniscule amount of mercury (and I do mean miniscule; about 4 mg), but to call it a problem is to vastly overstate the dangers involved. If you break a bulb, you may want to open a window for a bit, but that's about it. The clean-up steps the EPA mentions on their website (mentioned in the linked
The "problem" is serious enough that if you have a large population that uses CFLs (like places where incandescents aren't allowed anymore), you want to encourage people to dispose of them safely rather than to just throw them with the rest of the trash, but even if the mercury does end up in the environment, it will be less mercury than has been prevented from getting out by its power savings (Wikipedia has this picture, which demonstrates the principle for coal plants, but the same thing applies to other types of power plants, except "green" ones like hydroelectric and wind energy; but again, this is only relevant if the bulbs are disposed of unsafely, which is illegal in many places that mandate their use).
I can't believe people are modding you insightful. First, where does it say that anyone is stopping work on curing cancer? I must have missed that in the article.
Second, this thing saves power, which is typically a good thing (TM). Why, with the power we save, we might even have more resources to look for a cure for cancer!
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
In their rather brief technology brief.. they mention it works by generating an RF field fed though a waveguide to the plasma bulb. What frequency would this work on? Seeing their mention of a waveguide could be in the GHz realm? Anyone has more info on their tech? Hmm, chances of interference?
The 6000 degrees is the peak temperature of the plasma in the center of the bulb, not the temperature of any solid component.
Could these bulbs be used to make high efficiency, and/or high power, lasers?
When I see it
_drumroll_
This looks very similar to the sulfur plasma light used at the National Air and Space Museum, just updated and scaled down. It used a magnetron to excite sulfur in a ball that had to be continuously rotated--no electrodes, 6000K, full spectrum. see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulfur_lamp.
The benefits:
The Drawbacks:
They definately have some good applications, like for use in stadiums, airports, etc. However, I think there needs to be more research done to make them usable in homes and automobiles.
What happens when you stare at the filament?
For any blackbody emitter (incandescent light bulb or this fancy new plasma), the color temperature IS the temperature. It's only for things that don't emit like blackbody radiators (fluorescent and LED) where you have a different color temperature than temperature.
We already have the technology to halve the power usage of street lights. It's called an off switch.
OK maybe not quite half, perhaps cut by a third. Why do we need near daylight conditions for drivers at 2 in the morning, when they have perfectly good headlights?
As others have noted, this poster is off his rocker. I too am a photographer and deal with color temperature all the time...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Let's see...bulb operates at temperatures up to 6000K. 6000 deg K = 10,340 deg F. I sincerely doubt the unit would last long at that high of a temperature. I can see the light being given off has the spectrum distribution of a "blackbody radiator" at 6000 deg K. The phrase should be reworded to read "...bulb operates at color temperatures up to 6000K..." Yawn.
but rather, because we have these rare pieces of real estate called sidewalks, and people who actually use them for walking.
Support a few technologists in Washington.
The temperature/heat problem is easily solved by simply making the device compatible with current light fixtures. Build the device into a bulb of similar size and shape to incandescents and/or compact fluourescents. You have to build them into the same screw-in fitting, so doing the whole job is simply including both parts (bulb envelope and screw-in fitting) of the existing process. The vacuum in the bulb (between the bulb envelope and the device) would help the device maintain its operating temperature, a necessary part of its operation. This too is part of the existing process. The device will never replaced LED in closed spaces, such as instrument panels, but replacing light bulbs and compact fluourescents is very doable safely with existing manufacturing processes.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
A while back Cringely had a post about what sounds like a similar tech from Fusion Lighting and one of the drawbacks that he pointed out was that every one of those bulbs became a RF emitter in the 2.4Ghz range and thus would interfere with WiFi and the other numerous devices that use that unlicensed spectrum. This sounds very similiar, but so far no mention of the interference problem. Anybody know if this has the same issues? If it does, then it could be a polluter in both the visible light (as pointed out by many posts above) and RF ranges.
I totally agree with the parent! - Besides who would make newer, faster computers, or better spectrophotometers that help us find better compunds to cure the cancer. We need the botanists studying the life cycle of something totally irrelevant, like mold that a sub species of a gypsy moth eats. The cancer researchers can then often find something of use.
I'm not saying it well, but basic research is essential, not immediately, but for everything else. The knowledge built then has a synergistic effect.
Yes, every once and a while a certain subject needs a little attention, to help to really develop knowledge in a certain field. Like the HIV virus - the human immune system wasn't really understood at all. Now much of the research that went into HIV, has produced fruitful offspring, such as monoclonal antibodies which.....TAA-DAA... help fight cancer.
..........FULL STOP.
Time to add nimp.org to your hosts file. The link is an auto redirect from rds.yahoo.com to members.on.nimp.org. This is how Yahoo redirects search results to find out who clicked what. Yawho? search results are thus no longer safe to click. For best results, add rds.yahoo.com to your hosts file or equivalent blocker as well.
members.on.nimp.org resolves to poulet0.zoy.org. The IP address is [80.65.228.130]. Best to block that as well. The DNS administrator for this server is Slashdot User "Sam H", UID 3979.
Somebody at slashdot should have a look at our anonymous coward's IP address. It would be nice if we could quit this nonsense. I hope this isn't some troll that bought a low UID in the auction.
And maybe some slashdotter in Paris could call Sam and ask him to fix his compromised server. It does look like someone truly nasty took it over in August of 2005. Big Debian fan this one. Likes the GNAA routine and the whole bit.
I'm not certain about pinning this on Sam. sam.zoy.org resolves to a different IP. One of you intertubes wizards want to weigh in here?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
If you watch the video, you'll see that the engineer explaining the technology says that the plasma IS 6000K, which is why it closely matches the spectrum of light we see from the sun.
We've had light bulbs that work using snake oil for centuries
I'd rather they spent the money on better quality sidewalks and let our eyes do what they were made to do - adjust to the light.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Enter
http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=496584&cid=22831910
http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=496584&cid=22832306 (GP)
http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=496584&cid=22831980
http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=496584&cid=22832174
http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=496584&cid=22832278
Btw, "it takes one to know one" does apply to smartassitude, so take this posting with a grain of salt please...
Medium cat is MEDIUM.
Look at the Cree XR-E (R2 flux bin) or the SSC P4 (V flux bin). They are pretty much there at around 120 lumens per watt, and these are in regular production. Hell, I have flashlights with these in them. And prototype LED's are getting up to 300 lumens/watt of visible light.
I forget the reference, but there is a paper from a few years ago that essentially proved nothing can ever beat a P-N junction in efficiency. LED's are the future.
A 50yo such as myself usually can't read a street directory directly under the interior light of the car, let alone ride a mountain bike in the dark. Having said that, all stargazers know that the phase of the moon can make a huge difference to visibility.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Doesn't beat White LEDs at 300 lumens per watt.
Apparently Sam is a debian developer of some major projects.
If you're interested, the links on the left at that page give some interesting depth of background. He has a long and interesting history.
Be careful with this stuff. The above link goes to his server and they can be changed at any time. They appear to be harmless at the time I'm writing this though. Some of the content is NSFW.
He's apparently a big deal in IT.
It's possible his server's been owned, but if somebody did that, they did a remarkably convincing job of integrating the bad into the good.
I'm torn here. Responsible geek reaches his dotage at the ripe old age of 30? Trolls have decided to reach over into illegal activity? Some combination of the above? I regret I lack the time and tools to look into it further.
We'll just have to be more careful.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I want to point something out though. Although LED lifetime is often claimed to be 50000 hours or more (70K, even 100K), I am sure that the first LED lamps on the market will fail before the LED itself fails... Why? Because wires will corrode or the electronics needed to run the LED will fail first.
Most consumer electronics is designed for 10 years of average operation, which is like 6000 hour of operating. Even electronics in a car does not need to work longer than that. (say 300000km with an average speed of 50km/h = 6000 hours of driving).
So if nothing is done and standard electronic components are taken, the electronics will fail at less than 12% (6000/50000) of the lifetime of the LED.
For CFL bulbs this is not a big issue, there their life time is close tho the lifetime of the electronics anyway.
Well now! That just goes to show you can always count on a nerd to get miss a chance to share interesting details with others in the spirit of enthusiasm and instead use knowledge as a means of strutting feathers in some kind of penis-measuring contest.
You'll pardon me for still finding joy in this technology even though my knowledge of its details may remain be somewhat less than perfect.
-FL
I don't know which lamps you are specifically speaking of, but I can tell you the low pressure sodium lamps are very, very, very power efficient. A typical street lamp of this type might be 60-100 watts, but is very bright. A lot of power has already been saved by going to this type of lamp.
This new plasma could displace these types of lamps because police and fire departments hate what the lamps do to colors. You can't tell the difference between blood and oil.
The temperature on the outside of an incandescent lamp depends a lot on the size of the bulb, not on the temperature of the tiny thingy in the middle of the lamp. And the size of the bulb depends on safety considerations. For example, it matters if the bulb should be allowed to get dirty. Let's take two measures: same wattage and same luminosity.
- A 6000K 60W bulb will give much more light than a 3000K 60W bulb. Because glass is more transparent to light than to heat you could make the bulb smaller to end up with the same surface temperature. On the other hand the amount of energy the bulb dissipates is the same, so if you take ordinary use where the lamp is allowed to accumulate some dirt, then you'd prefer not to make the bulb much smaller.
- For the same amount of light you'd only need a 6000K 3w bulb or so instead of a 3000K 60w bulb, so it can be made much much smaller.
By design the glass (quartz) of halogen lamps has to run very hot in order to work but you can imagine adding an "outer bulb" with a certain radius to achieve the same safety demands. Halogen lamps often are behind a protective sheet of glass.
I want one of those bulbs in a tac-flashlight, though at 6000K it might be a little hard to hold onto.
A single room heater is ~1kW. Pnel heaters on the few hundred watt range are "additional sources" unable to carry the load on their own. Even if the light bulb os 0% efficient, that would mean you have 10x 100W light bulbs to heat ONE ROOM. 10% efficient means you need 11 100W bulbs.
That's a really bright room.
Unless you're talking bollocks.
>Driving requires that we can see dozens to hundreds of yards ahead, so need brighter illumination.
When driving in the rain, the lights have a habit of reflecting off of everything, the road rain on your windshield, etc, compounding the problem.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
so the guy that put up the virus is one of the people that made the VideoLan Player .... damn i just downloaded that like 5 minutes ago... help :\
Commonly available Cree R2 LEDS are 100 lumens per watt so this new light bulb is 1.4 times the efficiency. It'll be interesting to see if it appears in anything in the future or will just be an interesting technology that remains unexploited due to cheaper competing technologies.
That server probably hosts multiple domains. I think it's Sam's hosting provider who got pwn3d. So linking this to Sam is probably premature.
try whois 80.65.228.130
Slashdot's lameness filter prevents me from posting the results.
Would be nice if someone came up with cheap AND really good night vision goggles - wide field of view :).
There is nothing illegal about the content on nimp.org.
Now, if you want to talk about this, why don't we address the multiple and repeated posts from myself warning you all that Sam Hocevar, who at the time was running for Debian Project Leader, was the one hosting this website. This was like over a year ago. I was ignored and called a troll.
I get the last laugh on this one.
Nope, I can assure you that Sam is 100% responsible for this. Nimp.org has been hosting that content for several years now.
The real suckers are those of you who didn't believe me when I warned you about Sam's association with GNAA, trolling, scat porn, and the like, before you elected him to Debian Project Leader.
I missed your thread.
Certain aspects of this troll may be illegal in some jurisdictions. I don't know for sure - I'm not in law enforcement. It may not actually be a virus, but only a file that contains a signature. I'm not going to fire up a VM and infect it just to find out. Using Yahoo for URL obfuscation is interesting, though.
I also did not say that he is the actor here -- only that he's the DNS administrator for the server involved, and that novices shouldn't toy with such levels of uncertainty unless they accept the risks.
Sam Hocevar is a valuable member of the community. My initial concern was that this was some compromised server that should be fixed and then some curiosity about what was going on. If it happened that Sam got his amusement trolling the internet, well, I guess I could get over the inconvenience of blocking his site. Note that I'm not saying that this is the case -- just that if it were, then I'm no longer interested in the issue. I would think that someone with this level of skill would cover his tracks better if he cared to. Professional trolling can be an unpleasant but instructive laboratory in the field of social dynamics. I'm not interested enough in the field to engage in it myself, but as long as they keep it legal I don't have a problem with it.
Cmdr Taco does a good job of structuring Slashdot so these folks can be modded down quickly and disappear unless you're looking for them. In fact, we probably shouldn't be discussing the trolls at all. They thrive on the attention. That's all I've got to say about this.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I just bought a Panasonic PT-56LCZ70 - one of their new "LIFI" rear projection TVs. If i'm not horribly mistaken, this is the bulb they are using now. They rate the life at 20,000 hours, they describe it as a sealed, electrode-less lamp that is powered by microwaves, and they get pretty darn bright on relatively low wattage.
Maglite. Get a big one, say a 6 D-cell one. It's bright, has wide area illumination, and doubles as a very solid club.
Not a sentence!
>> This would be wonderful for a panted tank or for reef tanks.
I'll have you know, sir, that all my tanks proudly wear dresses!
And are not ashamed of it.
Hallelujah! -- A light bulb that saves the world AND keeps my breath feeling fresh all day!
If it's a nice, warm, sunny light, doesn't that mean its UV will burn skin and eyes just like the sun's does?
Just because it pops open a bunch of windows with goatse, weightlifter, and etc. doesn't make it a virus buddy.
The low pressure sodium vapor lamps that are ubiquitous in streets of USA are already pretty efficient (80-180 lm/W according to @everything2 and up to 200lm/W according to wikipedia). The impressive thing about the new light bulb is the purportedly white spectrum. The sodium street lamps paint the city an ugly orange-yellow.
If you go read their material at the site, the bulb is electro-magnetically stimulated plasma. They say that the core of it is no-kidding 6000K.
The way I understand it, there are no filaments and what not to burn out...
C//
The risk of fire in incandescent lamp is pretty negligible because when short circuit or fire happens, fuse will automatically disconnect the electricity. Flourescent lamp (and I believe this new lamp) is dangerous not because of the lamp itself, but because of the enclosing circuits. The sparks caused under certain circumstances, is not detectable by fuse.
If you delay pleasure infinitely, the pleasure will be infinite. (YM)
speaking as a Debian user, who cares?
The other obvious point is. . . anyone who shows up as "Anonymous Coward" with warnings about recognized members of a community is going to get ignored or laughed at even if he's right.
I'll start worrying when my program splash screens are covered with scat pr0n or GNAA sigs.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Suggestion: create animated comparisons of your two cases, bright points of light & gulfs of darkness versus more even illumination. Something like this, which compares traffic behaviors (which drivers can actively influence) in the left and right animations: http://amasci.com/amateur/traffic/seatraf.html
What if someone drives by with their headlights on?
Keep in mind the power quoted is in RF power, there is a penatly from converting from DC to RF power. In this case it's 30 percent. So that makes it only 98 lumens/watt from DC. The conversion from AC to DC is typically 95% efficient, so this now gives you 93 Lumens/watt. You must also add forced air cooling (fans), which add more wattage lost to the system. Eventually this type of lighting will be more efficient, but it probably won't happen because of this company--they simply don't have the vision, as is the case with most VC-backed companies.