LED life

I've set mode C on my jet 1 mk,to fast bright strobe. Will this shorten the LED life?

I'm not familiar with the jetbeams, but strobing does not by itself affect a LED's life.

Strobing does not affect the LED. It's a diode so strobing would have no effect, I've asked a similar question with my first post(PWM instead of visible strobing).

rooster.5 said:

I've set mode C on my jet 1 mk,to fast bright strobe. Will this shorten the LED life?

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Your will extend the life of the led, because it is not on all the time.

HKJ, I honestly think your lights are not on all the time. Just kidding! Thanks for the info guys.

rooster.5 said:

I've set mode C on my jet 1 mk,to fast bright strobe. Will this shorten the LED life?

Click to expand...

I understand where you're coming from with this -- in the case of things like fluorescent lights, or incandescent lamps without soft-starters, flashing the light off and on WILL shorten their life. This is becuase of the damage caused by the inrush current surge that takes place during the first second or so while the lamp warms up.

With LEDs however, there is no warmup cycle or anything -- they simply emit light when there is current running through them, period. Response time of both the LED and phosphor is on the order of nanoseconds. For example, my liteflux LF2 keychain light, on its lowest PWM setting, is only "on" for 250 nanoseconds at a time.


Basically the only relevant factor when it comes to LED life is temperature -- keep the temperature down, and they will live for a VERY long time. They also don't "burn out" suddenly like filament, they simply get dimmer and less efficient exponentially. Generally an LED is considered "dead" when it has reached 70% of initial brightness, because this is the point on the expoential curve at which output starts to decay most rapidly.

If you run LEDs with insufficient heatsinking however (nearly all cheap LED 5mm LED lights falls into this category) and expected life (to 70% brightness) goes from tens of thousands of hours, to tens of hours.