As many know the florescent light bulb is not the only alternative for incandescent bulbs. The up and coming challenger is the LED light bulb. LED’s started their life as a feedback mechanism for early electronics. They were dim indicators that showed that something was on or that something was happening. Until recently they were never considered a serious challenger to the current incandescent bulb. They have plenty of energy savings but also were not very bright and had issues with natural color light. 

Once upon a time LED was the ugly duckling. Sure it gave off light and used little electricity but not enough for everyday use. Recent research had determined ways to make LED’s much brighter and increase the possibility for home use. Another issue was the ability to give off white light, this issue too has found a solution. Still there are issues that keep them from homes. One of these issues is the price to purchase a LED bulb. Currently due to the complexity of LED bulbs because they use so many LED’s for one light bulb it is expensive to manufacture and that is passed down to the consumer. Currently to buy an LED bulb it costs anywhere from $20 – $80 to get a normal 30 – 60 Watt replacement bulb. Another issue is the angle of the light. LED lights have a very narrow path of light so it makes it difficult to get bulbs to have the wide angle lighting that normal incandescent bulbs. For instance, I have an LED flashlight, and its bright but, it only show the things you point it at so when you point it at the key hole on your car door the light does not show on your door handle. 

On the bright side, pun intended, there are advantages. LED Light bulbs have very low power requirements, and usually use less than half of the power of a comparable brightness Florescent bulb which is four times less than a comparable incandescent bulb. Also due to this efficiency there is very little heat produced. Finally LED lights are expected to last 10 times longer than a compact florescent bulb and 100 times longer than and incandescent bulb. That is quite a bit longer if I do say so myself. 

The future is so bright you gotta wear shades. OLED is the latest popular derivative. Some of the interesting ideas for OLED is to make a thin layer of the OLED material and put it all the way across you celling and give your whole house light or wrap it around a pillar. Some other ideas would be to make a clear version of OLED canvas and place it on your window, so at night you could turn on your window lights and it would light the room similar to daylight. For more news on this you should definitely check out Google News. 

Advantages:
- Low power usage
- Runs cool
- Lasts a very long time

Disadvantages:
- Angle of light
- Price to purchase

-LINKS-

Google News – OLED Lighting

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This entry was posted on Friday, August 24th, 2007 at 10:00 pm and is filed under Computers, Conservation, Home Electronics, Mobile Electronics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.