Hi:
Recently I've bought 7 different models of flashlights with Nichia 219 and 219b LEDs in them because I'm sick and tired of Cree LEDs' green hue when dimmed. Or ugly yellow/orange "high-CRI" neutral white. If I wanted orange light, I'd buy a damn lightbulb! I'm a 4000-5000K pure Plankian lover. Deviate just a bit in X or Y and I want to vomit.
Even the Nichia flashlights are disappointing me lately. I'll comment on this more extensively in another thread.
What I wish to mention here is this company, partly founded by Nobel Prize winner Shuji Nakamura, the inventor of the blue LED!
http://www.soraa.com/
I recently bought two Soraa MR16 lamps through 1000bulbs.com in order to evaluate their tech. 95CRI 10deg spot models 00733 (4000K), and 00349 (5000K). I won't post pictures because I've got health problems that make me take 2 hrs to do the simplest thing that should take 5 minutes. And there'd be not much point anyway, since it would have to go through the camera's idea of white, several layers of image processing, then your non-photographic-laboratory grade, non-calibrated monitor. The only way to see these things is to buy one and hook it up to a power supply.
The point is: When I've experimented with these lamps it's like seeing white light for the first time in my life. They put every LED from Cree, Nichia, Lumileds, Luminus, etc. to shame. It's absolutely friggin' perfect white light. With a deep red and deep violet spectral tail and no missing cyan, so every color imaginable can be rendered correctly.
Think about what happens here: 1. a cyan object whose reflectance spectrum consists of a blue and a green peak. Well, a traditional LED with a blue peak and a red through green "blob" will show it as cyan, but probably with significant variance in hue from one LED specimen to another. 2. a cyan object whose reflectance spectrum consists of a cyan peak. Well, what on earth is going to happen now? A regular LED is going to show it as, uhm, well, who really knows? But it might be some ugly olive or something, which I've actually seen an orange turn into with an older white RGB in one semiconductor chip LED tech.
Weird problems like this can happen because two widely different spectra can map to the same CIE chromaticity coordinates. But depending on the light source spectrum, different types of which can also map to the same pure white coordinates, it is possible for pathological cases to present themselves where the color that must be reflected to your eyes to see the color of the object just are not present in the light source spectrum in the needed proportions! Then you will see something truly wrong with the picture and realize that we have a long way to go for LEDs to be truly high color rendering light sources, other than just by the one metric of CRI.
Take the time to read about Soraa's technology. It is truly [r]evolutionary. I'm planning to take one of their lamps apart at work to see what's in there. From their www site, I gather than the GaN on GaN crystal permits much higher current densities than regular sapphire grown LEDs, so that they are actually using a much smaller emitter area for a given amount of lumens than would be the case for ex. in a Cree lamp of similar output.
Got that?!?! Doesn't that make the little LED light bulbs start popping on in your flashaholic brains? Think about what you could do with the output of a Cree XM-L coming from 1.33mm^2 instead of 4mm^2?!?! With 95CRI to boot!
Anyway, if you have the money, buy a sample of one of their MR16 lamps. Your perceptions of all your great flashlights will be ruined for life.
The question is now, how to persuade this company to market their LED tech. as bare emitters instead of integrated into these silly MR16 lamps? I may try to approach them in the future, as I do research using colored LEDs under extremely short pulse and absurdly high current conditions. So I have some important technical reasons to be interested in Soraa other than just white light. But like I said, I'm somewhat impaired these days, so I don't get things done very quickly.
This is an extremely important technology to keep an eye on (the eye that isn't blinded yet). It would be a bummer IMHO if GaN on GaN failed to gain traction in the marketplace. Hopefully, the days of LED manufacturers winning market share by increasing luminous efficiency at the expense of quality of white light are nearing their end.
Have fun!
Recently I've bought 7 different models of flashlights with Nichia 219 and 219b LEDs in them because I'm sick and tired of Cree LEDs' green hue when dimmed. Or ugly yellow/orange "high-CRI" neutral white. If I wanted orange light, I'd buy a damn lightbulb! I'm a 4000-5000K pure Plankian lover. Deviate just a bit in X or Y and I want to vomit.
Even the Nichia flashlights are disappointing me lately. I'll comment on this more extensively in another thread.
What I wish to mention here is this company, partly founded by Nobel Prize winner Shuji Nakamura, the inventor of the blue LED!
http://www.soraa.com/
I recently bought two Soraa MR16 lamps through 1000bulbs.com in order to evaluate their tech. 95CRI 10deg spot models 00733 (4000K), and 00349 (5000K). I won't post pictures because I've got health problems that make me take 2 hrs to do the simplest thing that should take 5 minutes. And there'd be not much point anyway, since it would have to go through the camera's idea of white, several layers of image processing, then your non-photographic-laboratory grade, non-calibrated monitor. The only way to see these things is to buy one and hook it up to a power supply.
The point is: When I've experimented with these lamps it's like seeing white light for the first time in my life. They put every LED from Cree, Nichia, Lumileds, Luminus, etc. to shame. It's absolutely friggin' perfect white light. With a deep red and deep violet spectral tail and no missing cyan, so every color imaginable can be rendered correctly.
Think about what happens here: 1. a cyan object whose reflectance spectrum consists of a blue and a green peak. Well, a traditional LED with a blue peak and a red through green "blob" will show it as cyan, but probably with significant variance in hue from one LED specimen to another. 2. a cyan object whose reflectance spectrum consists of a cyan peak. Well, what on earth is going to happen now? A regular LED is going to show it as, uhm, well, who really knows? But it might be some ugly olive or something, which I've actually seen an orange turn into with an older white RGB in one semiconductor chip LED tech.
Weird problems like this can happen because two widely different spectra can map to the same CIE chromaticity coordinates. But depending on the light source spectrum, different types of which can also map to the same pure white coordinates, it is possible for pathological cases to present themselves where the color that must be reflected to your eyes to see the color of the object just are not present in the light source spectrum in the needed proportions! Then you will see something truly wrong with the picture and realize that we have a long way to go for LEDs to be truly high color rendering light sources, other than just by the one metric of CRI.
Take the time to read about Soraa's technology. It is truly [r]evolutionary. I'm planning to take one of their lamps apart at work to see what's in there. From their www site, I gather than the GaN on GaN crystal permits much higher current densities than regular sapphire grown LEDs, so that they are actually using a much smaller emitter area for a given amount of lumens than would be the case for ex. in a Cree lamp of similar output.
Got that?!?! Doesn't that make the little LED light bulbs start popping on in your flashaholic brains? Think about what you could do with the output of a Cree XM-L coming from 1.33mm^2 instead of 4mm^2?!?! With 95CRI to boot!
Anyway, if you have the money, buy a sample of one of their MR16 lamps. Your perceptions of all your great flashlights will be ruined for life.
The question is now, how to persuade this company to market their LED tech. as bare emitters instead of integrated into these silly MR16 lamps? I may try to approach them in the future, as I do research using colored LEDs under extremely short pulse and absurdly high current conditions. So I have some important technical reasons to be interested in Soraa other than just white light. But like I said, I'm somewhat impaired these days, so I don't get things done very quickly.
This is an extremely important technology to keep an eye on (the eye that isn't blinded yet). It would be a bummer IMHO if GaN on GaN failed to gain traction in the marketplace. Hopefully, the days of LED manufacturers winning market share by increasing luminous efficiency at the expense of quality of white light are nearing their end.
Have fun!
Why not an Edison bulb?
