IF The LED Had Never Been Invented?

[Liquidspaceman]

If the LED had never been invented, do you think there would have been the "flashlight" revolution as it seems to have taken place with the Surefires, etc. ???

Would Xenon's and other bulbs have filled the niche enough to still have all these members on the Candlepower Forums?

 

[Gunner12]

Of course but in a different way. Surefires, any many of the older companies here started out with the Incan bulbs.

Us CPFers, have our hotwire lights and HID lights if there were no LEDs.

CPF would probably be more like a flashlight hotrodding forum.

 

[Sgt. LED]

I would of invented it myself.

 

[Daekar]

HIDs would have been miniturized to a greater extent, and IR reflecting envelopes would be more common on high-performance bulbs.

 

[DaveG]

I was always a flashlight nut,but the led lights got me back into flashlights.

 

[TITAN1833]

Perhaps this should be in the cafe :shrug:

No problem someone would have invented the diode emitting light,DEL

But seriously CPF would be without INCAN V's LED, HID V's LED and LED against everything else threads,how boring :tinfoil:

 

[Marduke]

I think that if it wasn't invented when it was, we would have stumbled upon it a second time (or a first time) with our more recent investigations with all the current various semiconductor designs. We would have skipped much of the infancy of the LED as just an "indicator light" for so many years while we waited for semi-conductor tech to catch up.

 

[StarHalo]

You'd have to buy replacement lamps for the hard drive indicator light on your PC.. :sick2:

 

[Marduke]

You'd have to buy replacement lamps for the hard drive indicator light on your PC.. :sick2:

And the best 1xAAA keychain light would be the Mag Solitaire. :sick2:

 

[doktordoris]

I don't know about never beeing invented.

But I remeber in 1991ish when blue LEDs appeared on the market for the frst time.

I can remeber being blown away by them, they cost 20 times what green or red LEDs cost, and I remember thinking " now they have blue, light bulb type LEDs will be here soon"

 

[Kestrel]

And the best 1xAAA keychain light would be the Mag Solitaire. :sick2:

:sick2: +1

Instead of all of our our SF vs Fenix arguments, we'd have to settle for SF vs Mag.:green: (flame suit on)

And our tint discussions would be something like "xxxx is almost perfect, but the tint is just a touch yellowish"

Folks haven't mentioned batteries yet in regards to this, I think it is just amazing you can have 100+ lumen incans with very usable runtimes in a small package like 2x18500. High performance batteries would still let the CPF community have so much fun.

 

[65535]

Remember half of this forum is still devoted to incandescent lights. Incans can do things LED's can't and vice-versa. I think LED's haven't been quite as important as light in general. Sure LED's are nice but realistically they are just modern replacements for older technology.

They never opened up a whole new world that was without light.

 

[Flying Turtle]

And the best 1xAAA keychain light would be the Mag Solitaire. :sick2:

You're probably right. I'd still be using mine and looking for something better. And I'd still be buying every other little 1 AAA I could find.

Geoff

 

[BentHeadTX]

If the LED was never invented?
Think of CPF as a bulletin board type thing with dial up modems and pure test (no LED no fiber baby!) One to ponder
OK, Surefire would have regulated hotwires with soft-start curcuits and STILL not run rechargeable AA batteries. I would run a Surefire with regulated hotwire with Nanomiser 6AA body or two lithium-ion cells. I would own two of them so I could go bike riding with them.
EDC would be a ?? 2AA regulated hot wire and a single AAA on the keychain. And that would be that...no HIDs just wires and regulators.
My first interest in anything to do with light was when I heard about something completely crazy...a LED that required a heat sink back in 2001. Then I took note of those white 5mm LEDs and picked one up. 2002 rolled in and I blew a bulb when mountain biking in Korea and almost ate frozen rice patty. Hmmmm, maybe a white LED backup light. Jumped across the pond, ran into the LED Museum and Craig...jumped onto a little friendly place on the web that talked about screaming 20 -25 lumen output Luxeon LEDs and I read. Dat2zip offered the BB500 Luxeon 2AA minimag drop-ins and my helmet light was born! Woohoo! 25 fat lumens on 2AA...
Ran into cy back in 2004 on a cross state bike ride, he figured I was CPF because of the LED minimag BB400 R2H on my helmet. Millermods L1P with U bin LuxIII and then the Cree revolution in 2007.
6.5 years later a 180 lumen L2D Q5 sits on my helmet and I'm still riding around in the dark.
LEDs are what hooked me into blowing all my money for the last 6.5 years... hotwires would of been much cheaper in the long run. But what fun would that be?

 

[Benson]

And the best 1xAAA keychain light would be the Mag Solitaire. :sick2:

No way -- I had a Brinkmann 1xAAA that was better. (I still have most of it, but an alkaline battery leaked all over the inside and ruined it. It awaits rebirth as a 10440 DD XR-E or some such, but it was better than a Solitaire, IMHO, before it died.)

 

[jtr1962]

I know I personally wouldn't have been here. I actually started getting interested in light when I was learning about full-spectrum fluorescents. That's how I discovered CPF. But without the continual revolution in LEDs I doubt I would have become an active member. I used to play with incandescents when I was younger but more or less lost interest in lighting due to their many limitations (i.e. power consumption, heat, lifetime, color temperature, cost). Unless something better had come along I'm sure I wouldn't have been following lighting like I have. Sure, we had fluorescents and HIDs, but fluorescent really isn't the best choice for portable lighting (and it's a pain to make suitable drivers), and HID is well out of the price league of many people (and it doesn't scale at all to really tiny sizes). In short, LED may on the surface seem to be only a replacement for lighting which already exists, but in essence it's revolutionary. It has and will continue to open up vistas in lighting previously thought impossible.

I think for me and many people part of the appeal of LED is that it's still in a state of flux. I tend to be more interested in things that change rapidly rather than slowly evolve (as incandescents and fluorescents have). In ten or twenty years when LED technology has more or less matured I'll probably have moved on to another hobby. Maybe in a few years thermoelectrics (peltiers) will be in the same state of continual improvement as LEDs are now, and that's where my interest will be.

 

[Dan FO]

LEDs have been around longer than any of us. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LED#Discoveries_and_early_devices

 

[Illum]

if LED was never invented I think
1: I would have never seen the light, consequently saved alot of money, and did something useful with my life instead of trying to get unilluminated minds to work properly.

2: Might have created a fully working HID using carbon rods

3: Saved a bunch of money and had it put into something more interest oriented, like building voltage boosters to run PR lamps on lemons or Onion powered Ipod recharging devices.

4: in the great scheme of things might have invested more time into what Darell the Great does the best around here...photovoltaics.


Like mom used to say, if your gonna sit in front of the computer without your shorts on, you should at least be looking at pretty girls, not those "silly flashlights"

 

[PetaBread]

:candle:

 

[yellow]

led: 38.400 posts,
incan: 6.500 posts
so much for 50:50 diversion



if the led never had been invented and not been reinvented by Cree,
I would have an A2 as my primary light and woud still use the trusted 9N für the ability to give 2 useful outputs.
No EDC, as I always got the one Solitaire that did not work good (contact problems). Like it was during military, when I was the only guy within my ~400 comrades that always got the faulty one (and I got a few Solitaires)
Besides already being the light then, I was never able to put the Solis to work.

PS, there were one good thing:
with incans, there is much more difference in beam and output with very cheap (crappy) lights and good ones. Everyone could see the difference with ease