TheArcLight
Newly Enlightened
- Joined
- Mar 14, 2011
- Messages
- 6
Just curious is there a brighter led than the XM-L right now, and it must be able to be handheld.
A lot of lights on the market specifically use the U2 bin, the SC600 for example. The main issue with current LEDs is that the efficiency drops almost 50% with higher drive currents. For example the XMl U2 and up does around 170 lumens per watt at 700ma but drops to 100+ lumens per watt at 3A. If Cree solves this issue with a, say even lower thermal resistance (i doubt it), the gains would be greater than trying to refine manufacturing techniques, which is what the higher bins involve. @Providence, very nice pics, what type of aspheric lens is that?Thanks for sharing your cool info link, @Hind!
Today's top XM-L bin seems to be U3, with an efficacy around 107 lu/w - that's up 17% from the T6 bin and we should see comparable increases in maximum lumens as manufacturers start working U3's into production.
That's really good news to me though, because I thought we would have to wait for a totally new die before we'd realize significant gains like this.
Have any manufacturers mentioned XM-L (U2) or (U3) yet? Some say it will be *years* before we have U3's in hand..