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DOE Announces Philips As L Prize Winner
JStyle writes "The DOE has officially announced a winner of the L Prize, giving the award to Philips in the 60W Incandescent Bulb replacement category. The goal of the L Prize competition is to 'develop high-quality, high-efficiency solid-state lighting products to replace the common light bulb.' Philips' LED light bulb won using less than 10W of power while claiming a life of greater than 25,000 hours. The light bulb is set to go on sale as early as spring of 2012."
The same as the 60W. That was sort of the whole point of the competition. Same light output for lower wattage.
910 lm
http://optics.org/news/2/8/8
"Perhaps because of those tough requirements, only Philips has officially entered the competition thus far – and that was nearly two years ago, back in September 2009. Over the past 18 months, its 910 lm design, which Philips says operates with an efficacy of 93.4 lm/W at a warm-white color temperature of 2727 K and offers a color rendering index of 93, has been put through extensive testing."
910 lm
For comparison, a regular 60 Watt incandescent outputs 890 lm at an efficiency of 15 lm/W
I'm pretty sure this is just an update to the "60W equivalent" Phillips bulbs that Home Depot has been selling for about $30 for some time now. I have several - two in a kitchen overhead fixture, and a couple in cheap "torch" lamps and a couple of Ikea floor lamps. They really have a nice warm color and they dim reasonably well with my Insteon dimmer, though they still don't dim to "architectural" levels (10%). The range of dimming works well in my kitchen though.
These use UV LEDs. There is a glass envelope which is coated with phosphor on the inside, and the UV light excites the phosphor.
I just think they tweaked it a bit, as they were already just below the efficiency criteria for the prize.
Most likely it will not be as cheap as incandescents or CFLs in terms of upfront costs. The cost saving is in the longterm as it uses less electricity. If we assume that this bulb lasts 25000 hours, at $0.10 per KWh, a 60w incandescent will use $150, a 13W CFL will use $32.50 and this bulb will use $25. So unless each of these bulbs cost $125 than incandescent and $7.50 more than a CFL, they will be cheaper in the long run. However the incandesent will have to be replaced 33 times and the CFL 2.5 times so that factors in as well
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Just take a common CD and hold it up so you can see the "rainbow" reflection for your light source. If it is a continuous "rainbow" then it's likely going to have good color rendering. If you see spots of color, then it's emitting peaks of various colors. My old "warm white" CFL's were peaks of about 6 colors. I hated them, but they were all that was available until recently.
Now I use "Bright White" CFL's which have what looks to be a nearly perfect, continuous spectrum. The best part is that they aren't yellow or blue tinged, they truly are a nice, crisp WHITE. I'm hooked.
Willie...