Any RGB flashlights available?

tenfour

Newly Enlightened
Joined
Oct 13, 2006
Messages
148
Location
Seattle WA
Are there any commercially available LED lights which have separate component Red, Green, and Blue leds to form a "white" beam? I am not a LED techie, but to me I would imagine that it would produce a warmer, fuller spectrum than single white LEDs.

What would be even cooler is if the leds were individually switchable for an option of colors.

I'm also interested to know people's personal experiences with this type of system, and if it produces a good color rendition using LEDs, or if it's extremely difficult to match the colors, or if it's just not practical at all. I could imagine that green LEDs appear so much brighter than red or blue that perhaps it's a technical challenge to balance their outputs, or that it's difficult to find the optimized wavelengths to form a white composite.
 

stoven

Newly Enlightened
Joined
Sep 1, 2006
Messages
101
I played around with a Perkin Elmer high power RGB emitter demo but it was not bright at all. Since the RGB emitter is basically made up of small individual red, green, and blue emitters it is difficult to mix the colors. Their honeycomb optic didn't mix the colors together perfectly and significantly reduced the light output. The demo hooked up to a computer where you can adjust the level of red, green, and blue to get any color you wanted. It just wasn't very practical because of the low level of light output. Hopefully, with the next gen emitters, they can make one even brighter.
 
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