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Cree Introduces 200 Lumen/Watt Production Power LEDs
ndverdo writes "Cree just announced production power LEDs reaching 200 lumen/watt. Approximately doubling the previous peak LED light efficiency, the new LEDs will require less cooling. This should enable the MK-R series to finally provide direct no-hassle replacements to popular form-factors such as MR-16 spots and incandescent lighting in general. The LEDs are sampling and it is stated that 'production quantities are available with standard lead times.'"
Kudos.
Yay, another slashvertisment.
The reduced cooling should help in lowering the costs of the LED versus the CFL and the reduced energy consumption will be a help as well.
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
I've had many other LED "bulbs" fail.
of the government banning perfectly good items, like inefficient lightbulbs and high-flow showerheads and toilets. Why not put an excise tax on them instead to discourage use?
oh what the weed farmers are going to do with this now... you should be able to replace a 600w high pressure sodium light with a 100w equivelant that performs real world better, and narrow it down to the ideal red and blue spectrum ranges for vegitative and flowering growth. if the cost is similar to current LED's it shouldnt cost more than 500$ per light and they would last for many years not a few months. the lower heat dissapation means easier growing and less worry about airflow, meaning co2 machines would maximize productivity. this is space age farming at its finest, and you wont need a princly budget to do it all. colorado and washington rejoice! and for everyone else, lower heat dissapation and lower electricity bills would make current identification methods that the DEA and police use obsolete. the savings in electricity mean quick ROI as well. i wish i had no morals sometimes lulz.
these are suitable for directional applications only, not a replacement for the common light bulb. just like every other LED light to date, just not quite right
Just got a little cheaper and more covert.
How do these compare to incandescent lights for color/temperature appearance and so forth. That's been the real deal breaker for me so far with other incandescent alternatives.
...seems to have the expert analysis. Some people are into flashlights so much and the LEDs that may be used in them, it's crazy what details they keep tabs on.
Post on the Cree MK-R LED at Candlepower Forums.
jaffa cree!
For comparative purposes, an incandescent bulb puts out about 52 lumens per watt. This LED is therefore about four times more efficient at converting electricity into light than the traditional lightbulb. That said, one of the big problems with LED lighting is that the light tends towards the blue end of the spectrum, whereas incandescents tend towards the red. Studies have shown that it is blue light that suppresses melatonin production, which in turn upsets the sleep/wake cycle. Similar problems have been found with LCD monitors compared to CRT monitors.
We may be improving energy efficiency, but we're actually creating health hazards in doing so -- because people assume all light is equal. It isn't.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Is there a theoretical maximum lumens / watt ratio? My 30 second search on Google does't show any relationship between the two terms, but I have to imagine there is some type of maximum...
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
When someone talks about "X Kelvin" as a colour temperature, they mean the spectrum emitted by a black-body at that temperature, which by definition is full-spectrum.
To a first approximation the sun emits radiation at 5800K.
There is nothing to figure out. Its a problem of physics. LEDs produce heat that must be dissipated somehow. Its no good if your replacement bulb has a huge heatsink attached to it. It also brings up the problem of lights in enclosed spaces, something incandescents have no issue with.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
They have to, since these things are typically ordered from overseas, with prohibitive return postage fees, and many times some manufacturer or vendor will try to become the cheapest by changing to LEDs of a crappy (i.e. fake) rather than Cree variety. When the item arrives, one usually has just a few days to ascertain whether it is genuine or if a refund needs to be requested from the payment service.
Wikipedia has a list of luminous efficacies:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminous_efficacy
200 lm/W seems pretty good; the theoretical limit is around 300 lm/W for LEDs, and that's about 44% overall efficiency.
While I *do* love to hear stories like this, and I believe that LED lighting, in some form, is the future, it dissappoints me to see that so-called "white" LEDs still produce quite poor spectra. Check out the spectrum on page 4 of the datasheet given on the MK-R series page. Compare this to the sun's spectrum. Because these are phosphor-based LEDs, you get a relatively narrow blue-violet peak (the true colour of the LED), followed by a wider hump, peaking at about yellow (the broad emission spectrum of the phosphor coating, which is down-converting those blue photons). While this looks "pure white" when you look directly at the beam, it renders colours very poorly (i.e. the reflected light from objects looks the wrong colour). This is what causes LEDs and fluorescent lights to often make a room appear sickly and food look unappetizing. Ideally, we should strive for a light which closely emulates the sun's spectrum, but this is obviously challenging.
Fortunately, there are a few next-gen LED technologies on the horizon. Quantum dot-based LEDs seem promising. By making dots of a specific size, you can precisely tune the output wavelength of a QD LED. Presumably you can combine a whole bunch of QD LEDs, each tuned to a different wavelength, to approximate the sun's spectrum. Alternatively, certain types of organic LEDs offer the ability to tune the wavelength, and similarly, produce a composite device which has a more ideal spectrum.
Still, until these materialise, plain 'ol incandescents are the only cheap light sources which produce a nice, continuous blackbody spectrum. Sigh.
If you read the datasheet, you'll see that the CREE MK-R is rated for a maximum of 15W, but the measurement of 200 Lumen/W is done at 1W output. It is known that LED's efficacy drops off quickly as the output power increases.
In the past, CREE have released similar news, claiming certain lumen per watt LED is available, all of them are measured at 1W output, but none of them have a power rating as high as 15W. I think comparing the efficacy of these chips @ 1W while they have completely different power rating is actually kind of misleading.
Couple years ago I invested in Cree cuz of their LED lights, lost about 15% in a couple months before I could get out. Now they're at about 1/3 of what they were when I got out.
until they show up in walmart they're just yet another super efficient thing we don't have unless you hunt the fuckers down.
And even then. these like everything else will be shit out in china and have crap quality.
With this power savings in LED tech humans can grow plants on the moon. Not to mention less heat will make it so to national guard doesn't contact the local authority about my hot closet.
Those mega bright HID headlights usually come in around 3000 lumens at 35 watts. So an LED that bright is pretty insane.
If they had produced an LED that put out more light and more heat for the same energy, that would REALLY be something.
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
Seriously, though.... I have not seen Crees used in household-type LED Bulbs. I would love to see these, if they can sell them for less than $10 and make them dimmable, too.
As for current bulbs, I've been pretty happy with LED Bulbs I bought at Microcenter for $7.99 ($8.99 for dimmables). They have nice heatsinks and have worked great, unlike my early experiments with LED Bulbs (when nobody carried them in brick and mortar stores). They put out as much light as a 40watt incandescent, and use half the electricity as a CFL - and best of all, I haven't had any burn out.
A year ago, I had no idea who "Cree" might be.
Then I bought one of these:
http://www.fenixlight.com/viewproduct.asp?id=151
It's the best pocket flashlight I have ever owned. Bright and useful on "low" power (32 Lumens) and very bright on high (105 Lumens). 500 minutes of light (over 8 hours) from a single AA cell on low, or 110 minutes on high. (I'm trusting the manufacturer's numbers here, but I can verify that it actually is bright and lasts a long time.) Anyway, that's a Cree LED, and it doesn't have the horrible bluish tint of older LEDs I have bought in the past.
More recently I bought an Ecosmart light bulb at Home Depot. "Ecosmart" is a Home Depot house brand, and uses Cree LED chips. For $10 I got a light bulb that claims to give equivalent light to a 40 Watt incandescent bulb, but seems brighter than that (I think because it's much more directional; it's in a downward-facing fixture so that's fine).
http://www.homedepot.com/h_d1/N-5yc1v/R-202188260/h_d2/ProductDisplay?catalogId=10053
And just two days ago I got a fixture that retrofits a 6" can fixture with an LED light. I bought one with the 2700K color temperature, because I like that better than the "colder" lights (bluer, which actually have higher color temperatures). I walked into the store planning to just buy a bulb for my can light fixture, and now I'm very glad I bought the whole Ecosmart fixture. I found an LED light geek web site, and the guy bought one of these just to do a teardown; he found 5 Cree LED chips inside it. Where I live, the power company is subsidizing these lights, so I only had to pay $20 for this light. This dissipates only 9.5 Watts, yet it's very bright. I love the design: it includes three spring fingers to hold it into place, but if you rotate it the fingers collapse and stop holding it. So two decades from now when the LED stops working, it will be easy to remove.
http://www.homedepot.com/h_d1/N-5yc1v/R-202240932/h_d2/ProductDisplay?catalogId=10053
So now I want to see Cree make some sort of flush-mount ceiling fixture. I have only found a few flush-mount LED fixtures, and they are all super expensive and I can't find the 2700 K color temperature. I did find one promising looking cheap fixture, but on eBay only and it's an import from China... I have no way to be sure of the quality, other than just buying one and trying it.
My current plans are just to install some fixtures that have air gaps for circulation, so I can use the Phillips LED bulbs (omnidirectional, not directional like the Ecosmart ones). I'm going to install one of these tomorrow and see how we like it. In case the URL doesn't work right, this is a "Project Source 2-Pack White Ceiling Flush Mount" from lowes.com.
http://www.lowes.com/pd_394606-43501-87822-01_0__?productId=3745415
Based on my experience with these lights, we are just on the cusp of these becoming mainstream and common. I've been buying these because they are subsidized, but electronics always gets cheaper over time, and within a couple of years or so LED lights should be cheap enough without subsidy that everyone starts buying them. (Even without the subsidy, they make sense long-term versus incandescent bulbs. If you have incandescent lights, consider LED rather than compact fluorescent.)
P.S. I haven't bought these, but I wish the office where I work would buy them. These are Cree replacement lights for standard fluorescent fixtures. Some companies are making LED lights that are the exact size of a T8 fluorescent bulb, with matching pins; for $60 or $80 or so each bulb, you can replace fluorescents (but you must rewire the fixture to bypass the ballas
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
When I started working with LEDs they just introduced the LM3909 oscillator - it allowed an LED (only red in those days) to blink for an entire year on a single D cell.
What keeps amazing me about LEDs is just how little energy they need to start lighting up. I'm not really into electronics anymore (was only tinkering with it since I was 11), but I recall that by using a FET for constant current meant you could be pretty flexible about the supply voltage (within limits, of course, the dissipation has to go somewhere), and by researching what it was (been a while) I came across other interesting ideas.
As a single, simple component, I find LEDs are about the most interesting ones to experiment with (and LDRs, and NTCs, and .. :) ). They are nice to introduce children to electronics because they instantly do something visible..
Insert
On my bicycle I use a 30 or 40 year old chrome headlight made for use with a dynamo.
I replaced the 6v 2.4watt filament bulb in it with a high power white MES LED module designed to have 100 degree illumination. Powered by a single PP3 radio battery under the saddle, it produces a 15 foot cone of light on the road ahead of me lighting everything up to handlebar height (yes, I'm overvolting a 6v LED module but it doesnt seem to cause any problems, it still runs cool)
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
200 L/W is not validated in their documentation. There front page even states Up to 1769 lm @ 15 W, 85C ( which is 117 L/W.). I cant find in their documents where you can get it to 200 L/W unless its
- 6000K+, 60CRI or less, running at a low junction temp and low current.
I've noticed a disturbing trend. Car manufacturers have been using the new lightning technologies to cram e.g. the headlights into ever smaller spaces. The resulting light beam still conforms to regulations, but because the peak intensity is much higher, those headlights are much more likely to dazzle oncoming traffic. The higher the light intensity of the lamp (lm/cm^2) the worse this will get.
When I was about 7 I was first introduced to electronics. I can still remember the anticipation of ripping into a Tandy (Radio Shack in the UK) mixed box of LEDs. So many bright colours and shapes.
Nowadays I buy them in bulk from China to refit my friends homes to save money. In certain cases such the the popular GU-10 50w downlighter bulbs, LEDs have been up to the job for quite some time if you ignore the high-power LED versions and buy units with 60 to 80 individual warm white LEDs. Been doing this for 2 years now and only seen a few failures, and all the recipients report lower fuel bills to an extent that paid for the bulbs in months. Failures are a fact of life with Chinese LEDs but if you make sure you buy 10% more than you need, you;re covered and the savings materialise as expected.
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
Don't see why he wants to buy incandescents. Is it because he's told he can't? Therefore, like a temper-tantrum-two-year-old, they are whining about how they wanna wanna wanna wanna incandescent?
Really, kids, grow up.
Incandescents waste most of their energy in heat and it's not even heat you use to warm your house (else you'd have your radiators stuck up on the ceiling) and about the only people who would have a problem would be those growing drugs in their home.
If you want to heat your place use an IR lamp.
If you want to illuminate your place use a CFL/LED light.
http://www.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DKp1_UJLExxM
On the other hand, there have been a few fire marshal reports that identify LED bulbs installed in enclosed fixtures as the cause of house fires.
that doesn't flicker.
When you say "Dangerous Heavy Metals", I assume you are referring to the mercury used in CFLs. Well, it would probably be good for you to know that if you consider the proportion of the nation's electricity generated using coal, an incandescent bulb is responsible for the injection of far more mercury into the atmosphere than is contained in a CFL tube.
Internal parts aren't all there is to heavy metals.
It takes 8 colour swatches and measures the rendering of those. It does not do a good job of looking at actual spectrum, and there are far more than 8 colours to worry about in the real world. Look at the spectrum of an LED vs CFL some day. The CFLs are very, very spikey with lots of holes, the LEDs are continuous with more gentle peaks.
We need a new system for measuring light quality, and indeed standards agencies are looking in to it.
I sold my CREE stock.
Ashame, my only heater is electric, and draws a heck of a lot more amps than a lightbulb when it cycles on.
Drawing more amps is irrelevant in this instance. Your heater will not be on constantly and what matters is how effectively it turns power inputs into useful (heat in this case) output. The efficiency of a light bulb in creating heat is not much different than an electric heater but the effectiveness is significantly different. While there are some cases where a light bulb is appropriate for use as a heat source, this is not typically the case in home heating applications.
There are several factors you do not seem to be considering:
1) You (probably) do not need to operate your furnace all year. This means that you are wasting large amounts of energy from the light bulbs any time you are not utilizing them as a heat source which in most of the world is the majority of the year. If you are running an air conditioner then you are generating unnecessary waste heat from the light bulbs which you then have to use additional unnecessary energy to remove from the building. This effect greatly reduces the utility and net efficiency of light bulbs as heat sources. A furnace is only turned on when you need/want heat but is off otherwise. This is not true for light bulbs.
2) Light bulbs are not designed as heat sources so they tend not to disperse the heat they generate in a particularly effective distribution. The heat will tend to be conducted locally and usually relatively high in the room which since heat rises isn't especially useful. Your heater on the other hand has ducting or other systems to distribute the heat it generates in a much more effective manner.
3) Light bulbs aren't useful as a heat source when you want heat but not light. Such as when you are trying to sleep.
Do whatever you want with your money.
Except he can't do what he wants because clueless asshats, that think they know everything and they know better than everyone else, like yourself, thought it was better for the government to ban the types of bulbs he prefers to use.
Why don;t you have a seat over there and enjoy a huge mug of STFU, you moronic, pompous douche!
In what way? I actually contend the opposite, international trade helps most people. The less paid for an item the more money people have. That money can be used to buy other items, pay down debt, or be invested. Of course, until recently, people here in the US lived beyond their means. They continuously borrowed money the buy more stuff.
As for Walmart/Sam's, Walmart now has stores in China. And Chinese make enough money to buy from Walmart, as well as upscale stores. I don't recall what newspaper it was but one reported the first week Apple's new iPhone was available in China more than 1 million were sold there. Seeing as Apple products are only affordable to the wealthy, there are a lot of wealthy people in China. And those people buy American products sending money to the US. Another American company making money in China is Caterpillar, which builds construction equipment in Indiana employing thousands of people. John Deere based in IL does business in Brazil, China, and around the world. There are many other US based multinational businesses who also are in Brazil, China, India, and Russia (BRIC) helping employ more American workers.
And without international trade you would not be using a PC, or a cell phone. The US does not have a ready supply of a number of metals used to make these products. A major source of Coltan, columbite–tantalite, is Congo. Unfortunately it's mining fuels the conflict there.
GE leads a call to develop rare earth minerals in the US to reduce our dependence on Chinese suppliers. If China wanted to it could shutdown a number of US businesses by stopping exporting these minerals ton the US.
So who's the jerk?
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
With the end of personal production licenses in March 2014 to mandatory sentences of 6 month for 6+ plants we'll see a bigger evolution in LED technology soon.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Fiber optics will solve the heat issue problem in some applications. Once manufacturer's implement it into their designs, we will also see high-efficiency lighting in appliances where more traditional tungsten style lamps currently prevail. (ie: ovens) This is because the light source will be physically and thermally isolated from where light is needed.
Of course once they get around to doing that, don't expect to be able to easily replace the light source. It will probably be tucked away somewhere difficult to get at as the LED producing the actual light will be expected to last for the life of the appliance.
I looked at the data sheet of the Cree XLamp MK-R and even though they state "Delivering up to 200 Lumens per Watt" in the header, looking closer the best I found was nominal 147.25 lm/W and top luminance bin = 157.51 lm/W (which I wonder if I can order and at what price?).
Forward voltage is 11.7V at 700mA = 8.19W
The highest lumen output I found was 1206lm at 5700K and 6500K at a CRI of 65, which makes an efficiency of:
1206lm / 8.19W = 147.25 lm/W
If you can live with such a low CRI and cold white then that isn't bad, but not even the best.
I have seen 150 lm/W from other manufacturers at 5000K and CRI 70, which is a more natural white and slightly better CRI and perhaps even with a better R9 (Red), but the Cree data sheet doesn't state the individual values of R1 to R14, it is difficult at this point to compare.
What is however very good of this Cree LED is the thermal resistance at 1.7 C/W. Together with the max. junction temp at 150C it provides a component that is very well suited for high power and high luminance lamps.
An interesting development, but not the 200 lm/W I was hoping to see.
There is virtually no selection of dimmable CFL, the few that exist are incredibly expensive
I think that's enough examples to show there are inexpensive dimmable CFL bulbs. However Walmart has more.
CFL sucks. We're better off with incandescent in the meantime.
I've used CFLs for more than 20 years and have not had a problem with them. That's not entirely true, I have had problems with them. In photography, photos on film show color casting with florescent bulbs, and with incandescent bulbs as well. The first CFL I bought I paid $20 for, and over the next 15 years it paid it's cost back in avoided cost. That is in energy not used and in not having to replace incandescent bulbs. I wonder if you enjoy wasting money.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Actually, most of the heat generated by lightbulbs is transmitted as infrared radiation rather than via conduction
Which is perfectly useless when you want heat but no light from a standard light bulb since a standard bulb cannot emit radiation without some of it being visible light. It also is of limited value outside the room the light is located within which matters fairly often. A bulb is also omni-directional so you need a reflector of some sort.
As it's only hot air that rises, and most heat loss is due to warm air escaping the house, this can actually be considerably more efficient since you can maintain a much lower air temperature while still being comfortable.
So I'm supposed to sit a few feet from a light bulb in my house to stay warm like a pet turtle? Thanks but no thanks. Nothing wrong with using infrared heaters but there is a reason they are mostly used as localized space heaters. While you are correct regarding the radiation, my comment stands that this is not a particularly useful means of distributing heat in most homes. I'm sure we could design a home to take maximal advantage of this type of heating but I'm equally sure that it would be less costly to simply use a more efficient heat source like a gas furnace. You'll also note that such a heating arrangement tends to only heat the side facing the heating element. This means that light bulbs up high will heat your head up considerably more than your feet. I had an IR heater in my garage a few years ago. Kept my heat roasting hot and my feet unpleasantly cold. If I walked to the other side of the garage, it was of essentially no value as a heat source.
Bear in mind that I'm responding to the rather ridiculous argument that we should keep incandescent light bulbs around because they generate heat as a byproduct. This is an absurd argument because A) light bulbs are not a particularly efficient means of generating heat and B) the need for heat and the need for light often does not overlap and C) for 3/4 of the year the heat light bulbs generate due to their use as a light source is waste heat that then has to pumped out of the house at additional expense. Light bulbs can be used for heat in some cases but most of the time it is a costly, inefficient and not particular effective means of heating a space.
... for the Scrulls.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Oh why, why can't they install those in projectors, instead of those nuclear mini power plants?
The reduced cooling should help in lowering the costs of the LED versus the CFL and the reduced energy consumption will be a help as well.
Yesterday I went to Walmart to get new light bulbs, old CFLs I had burned out. There Walmart had LED bulbs in stock, at around $20 a bulb. I ended up going to Sam's to get CFLs, an 8 pack cost less than $6.
Falcon
And 3 years ago CFL's were going for as high as $10+ per bulb.
There are still $10 CFL bulbs, Walmart has bulbs for $12 as well as under a dollar.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
My first one, bought around 1997, lasted one week. They weren't cheap back then either.
I bought my first one about 10 years earlier, in the late 1980s. And it wasn't cheap, it cost about $20, but it lasted me more than 15 years without a problem. In that tyme I moved once across country and four tymes across town, bringing it with me.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Until the number of competitors come along, and the market gets filled, you will pay for leds in the same style you pay for Apple Products.
I don't understand. One, Apple does have competition, for every single product it sells. Two, while I haven't compared Apple pricing lately I compared the price of the MacBook Pro I'm typing this on to laptops from other OEMs before I bought this one. Comparing prices of laptops with comparable specs, I found one laptop $50 cheaper but others more. A Dell, or an Alienware which was owned by Dell, was $200 more for instance. A comparable HP and IBM was more too..
Of course a person can't start with a PC from some OEM like Dell or HP then compare it to a Mac because Apple does not offer all the configuration options the other companies do.
What's really bad now is that Apple has not released a new Mac Pro in more than 2 1/2 years. All Apple has done is bump up the CPU speed. While the 2011 MacBook Pro included the Thunderbolt interface the Mac Pro still does not have it. Tim Cook promised a new Mac Pro in 2013, but he didn't say when other than that. And as my MBP is more than 5 years old I wanted to replace it with another one, however Apple dropped 17" MBP, which is what I have and wanted to replace it with.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?