Philips to light up the world with brighter, smaller, more-efficient LEDs

Quick...let's outlaw compact flourescents!

The Australians are getting close to outlawing incandescents...

Heck, that's nothin' The USA is close to outlawing citizens.

Why? Are they incandescent?

Sigh...at one time we were. But, "the candle that burns twice as bright burns half as long."

Um...excepting LEDs, of course.

Yes! Oh Yes please as soon as pos.

I find that LEDs are very bright and can be seen from great distances, but are useless as flashlights. They do not project light any distance at all. So the user can be seen by others but he cannot see any distance. Can anything be done to change this characteristic.

Mike Chasin

What you're talking about is only a matter of perception. Recent advances in widespread LED commercial products (eg. 3W maglight LED replacement bulb) are comparable to incandescents of years past.

I imagine that your idea that an LED is good at short distances is because most of them are focused by their plastic packaging.

There is, however, no difference in characteristics of light emitting from a standard resistive wire and a LED, which is why I cited that it is only your mind playing a trick on you. The light from one goes just as far and gets just as dim just as quickly from both sources.

See here: www.elecosn.com

Here are dimmable LED Bulb, and LED incandescent bulb

Good torches are available as of now using narrow angle 15 to 30 deg LED's. Their beam will reach out up to 80 feet plus.

They are just a tad expensive. The UK always has to pay more for less so you can have cheaper goods.

It may be only my perception. But if I can see with an incandescent flash light and cannot with a LED flashlight, my perception is that I will not buy or use a LED flashlight. I bought a 3 LED flashlight and it is useless.

Thats my perception.

Mike Chasin

Mike: Keep an open mind for a while. My experience was the same until I saw a 9 LED flashlight that a gas company tech had. It really lit up the night. I have since bought 4 of them and love them. They're tough little lights, powered by 3 AAA batteries in a little cartridge, made in China and cost about $10.00 ..... $7.00 on sale. DickL "There are only 10 kinds of people in this world, those who understand binary math and those who don't."

I bought a string of white xmas lights, and embedded them into a sheet of white styrofoam. They just pressed into the back...no heat to worry about! This gave me an illuminated panel which I now use to light my desk.

No shadows. A tiny fraction of the power that my old desk lamp used.

Is it eco friendly? Well, not sure how much enviromental impact went into plastic insulation, but I bet I could illuminate a ceiling for not very much money.

We forget the biggest problem: good LEDs are still too expensive. It will take a while until they replace much cheaper incandescents or flourescent. Of course, if you think of a lifetime the investment makes sense but still people won't hurry into the stores to buy LEDs 10 times more expensive than their current bulbs. Just because most consumers like to pay more over time than a big up-front payment.

I checked this out a few months ago before replacing all the incandescent bulbs in our home. What I found was that lumen for lumen, LED's where about 30-40% more efficient than incandescent, but compact fluorescents were about 70% more efficient. The LED's they were advertising at the time as using a fraction of the electricity were not putting out nearly as much light. It's kind of a slight of hand sales trick.

OK, let's ban LEDs then.

One thing that noone has mentioned is the fact that the LED's produce light on a narrower spectrum than incadescent. They may produce the same lumens for less money but perceptually they are inferior because not as many colors are reflected. This may be overcome in the 9 LED flashlight if the LED's are producing different colors of light but I doubt this is the case.

I own a 4.5mm 1Watt Luxeon LED flashlight. It uses 3 AAA's and vastly outshines my 2D Xenon Maglite. The LED flashlight is able to cast a focused light clearly up to 80ft. It gives 6 hours of very bright light and an additional 12 hours of usable light. We've all dropped incandecent flashlights while they were lit. Once you pick it up, you have to change the bulb. With the LED, it just keeps shining.

I recently replaced my signal lights with 4.5mm 3W amber LED's and got a ticket for the lights being too bright. They're still in there, I just avoid that neighborhood. Oh yeah, FYI... Law Enforcment will soon remove those tell tale roof top lights and replace them with either inboard LED arrays or Low profile roof units. Keep a Look out...

A laser LED in a laser pointer outshines about anything over great distances but I would hate to try to read a newspaper by it. How does your flashlight compare to an incandescant bulb in a household light fixture at, let's say, 60 watts?