The future of LED's?

The future of LED\'s?

LED's have come a long way in the past few years, but they still have their shortcomings. Even the best of the current 5-watt Luxeons can not reach out and light up things at longer distances like an incandescent can, even with the 30mm optics, which help in that regard.
I wonder if it is likely that at some point in the not too distant future, we can have long run-time, and long throw, in a small package?
I would love to see an LED light, about the size of the current Surefire L4 or smaller, that had calibrated brightness levels (like the upcoming ARC LS4) so that you had Surefire C2 brightness levels and throw, and several other selectable, lower light levels that would give you increasingly longer run-times. Sometimes you don't need or want an intense beam.
Actually, ARC will supposedly be producing one of these with the 5-watt Luxeon next year, and it should be awesome, but it will likely still not have the long reach of a good incandescent and if it uses only a single 123 cell, I doubt the run-times could be very long.
What is the forecast for the future, maybe 2-3 years down the road?

Re: The future of LED\'s?

Long throw = small light emitting area + big reflector. If you have a big light emitting area a.k.a 5 watt LS, it's much harder to collimate the light into a tight beam with a small reflector as compared to say, a pin head size light emitting source which emits the same amount of light.

By the time Lumileds or any other LED manufacturing company manages to reduce the 5 watt die to something like the size of 1/2 the current 1 watt die, you can expect throw. Lots of it, in a small-medium size reflector. That might be a long way from now though.

Re: The future of LED\'s?

If they could get the GaN into dice instead of films, that may help a bit.