Questions on purposely strobing LED's

Questions on purposely strobing LED\'s

Could the LS LED's (or other types) be turned on and off in the 60+ hz range and would it hurt them? Could there be power savings from a given source say batteries and some sort of electronic circuitry that would do this?

Since the brain/eyes percieve light as being constantly "on" above certain frequencies, I was wondering if this might be a viable way of saving power (since the light is actually off much of the time) yet keeping a certain "perceived" light output. Under the assumption that LED's can be turned off and on this fast without problems.

Note: I am not an electronics whiz so I don't know if any circuitry that could do this would suck up even more power than the on/off cycles would save.

Just curious.

Re: Questions on purposely strobing LED\'s

Yes, it can be done without hurting the LEDs as long as you keep below the LED's permissible current. Unfortunately, the specified peak current is below the tried average current /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/frown.gif (which again is around 2..3x the specified avg. current).
And it won't help your brightness perception, pulsing a LED would just make it seem dimmer - TANSTAAFL.
Oh, and 60 Hz is practically DC (for a LED), i.e. at 60 Hz, you'll probably still have to work with the average (not peak) current. Things don't even start to get intereting unless you go below 1 ms (above 1 kHz), small non-white LEDs usually work well up in the uS range, special Types (like the drivers for high-speed fiberoptic links) _much_ faster.

Bye
Markus