Bike Lights Data Base

[Alaric Darconville]

LEDs excel at visible light spectrum. This means they're not so good at telling the difference between oil and water, ice and water, and are also typically pathetic at penetrating bad weather, and tend to rainbow at the higher lumens.

Our eyes excel at viewing the visible light spectrum. Stop and think about what the "visible light spectrum" is and you'll discover why IR and UV shouldn't come into play here.

Any white light, or light that also goes into the IR and UV portions of the spectrum, will rainbow under the right conditions.

Ultimately, the most important characteristic of a road-illumination device: Intensity.

It can almost-kinda be solved with advanced filters that change some of the spectrum into infrared and UV, the waves that give incandescent and HID such advantage.

Filters don't change light from one part of the spectrum to another. They merely only allow a portion of the light to pass through.

Also, why would we need to filter LEDs? There's such a thing as UV and IR LEDs...

 

[Alaric Darconville]

Thread unstickied-- the landscape of LED bike lights has changed greatly since the thread was started in September 2007, and even since the original post was edited in October 2010.

 

[RickZ]

No, you aren't quite right. Uv itself obviously isn't seen, it charges the surface of atoms' electrons and then the electrons change color. Infrared does the same, to a smaller degree, and infrared most importantly is not necessarily invisible, it refers to the lowest end of the visible spectrum as well. Filters are the capable of completely changing the spectrum itself, otherwise explain how uv florescent lights emit anything visible. Likewise how uv doesn't matter without light itself.
So, now once you understand that, you understand my comment and the reason LED sucks for bike lights.


And I strongly disagree. As a semi pro cyclist there has not been any market change that is positive on the market for LED bike lights for the average consumer or even the affordable "$300 price cap."

Show an example, and I'll be happy to shoot it down. There are options, but extremely limited.

 

[Alaric Darconville]

No, you aren't quite right. Uv itself obviously isn't seen, it charges the surface of atoms' electrons and then the electrons change color.

No. Sometimes UV can cause certain things to fluoresce, but this isn't changing the surface of an atoms electrons. Nor are the electrons changing color.

Infrared does the same, to a smaller degree

To the same degree: Zero.

Filters are the capable of completely changing the spectrum itself, otherwise explain how uv florescent lights emit anything visible.

No, the filter doesn't change the spectrum. It just passes the UV light, rejecting most of the visible light but still retaining it. A completely uncoated fluorescent tube emits visible light as well as UV-C, making them unsafe to be around; the coated ones to make "black light" haven't changed the spectrum at all.

Now that the thread has devolved from what (at one time) was a good repository of bicycle lights to pseudoscientific babble and other nonsense, the thread is being closed.