LEDs: Illuminating The Future

Popular Mechanics



"Hang on to your burned-out light bulbs. Your grandchildren could pay their way through college by selling them as antiques. After more than a century, the light bulb is about to go the way of the whale-oil lamp. The contender is the light-emitting diode (LED), perhaps best known as the little bump on the top of the TV remote control...."

<font color="800080">Hang on to your burned-out light bulbs. Your grandchildren could pay their way through college by selling them as antiques.</font>

I doubt it. Unfortunetely, even the early drawn wire tungsten bulbs from the 1920s are worth little. Working, $10-15 perhaps. Dud? Nothing. Maybe a buck or two at the most. And given the fact that todays bulbs are produced in volumes a few orders of magnitude higher, I don`t think your old Sylvania Soft Whites will be worth anything for a fair few centuries. Early Luxeon LEDs and flashlights using them could be though, because they were only produced in small amounts, and were the first of their kind.

Although I do realise that wasn`t exactly the point of that line in the article.

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Chris M. said..."I don`t think your old Sylvania Soft Whites will be worth anything for a fair few centuries. Early Luxeon LEDs and flashlights using them could be though, because they were only produced in small amounts, and were the first of their kind."

My thoughts exactly. I can see some guy on antiques roadshow in the year 2075 talking about our ARC-LS's and L4's as the earliest "Practical" examples of LED lighting and very collectable.

GregR

Yes... I can see it now...

"This? Of course! A Peter Gransee original! In a rare High Dome Configuration, with all the packs, even the twisty single AA pack! Jolly good, it took these quaint 123 batteries which were advanced for the time... Oh look! There's one still inside! It still works! It looks Red... Hmm.... Oh! Naughty Naughty! Using a Surefire 123 in an ARC light..."

PhilAlex-

Yes, I would imagine that's exactly how it would go! LOL!

GregR

I think LEDs are great, but until there's an LED with the output of a 60W bulb costing about $5, regular incandescents are far from becoming antiques.

Well who would have guessed that the Chinese could reduce the cost of a CFL to almost the price of an incandescent...

Ignoring lifetime and colour rendering issues,the lumens per watt still kicks sand in the face of LEDs.

What we all want is performance like this :

http://www.centennialbulb.org/photos.htm

Adam

PhotonBoy-

Absolutely right. Currently the best applications for LED are not in common situations but in applications where design, long life/inability to replace if fails, "relatively" cooler needs favor LEDs.

When I was a kid I remember reading Popular Electronic about the new digital computers, heck they were just toys, they had no real applications at the time. You entered data flipping toggle switches in shift registers. I thought to myself, what's the point. Boy was I wrong. Two guys named Steve and Steve were two or three years behind me in the next High School over, starting this company later known as Apple Computer.

GregR

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Double_A said:
PhotonBoy-

Absolutely right. Currently the best applications for LED are not in common situations but in applications where design, long life/inability to replace if fails, "relatively" cooler needs favor LEDs.



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Christian (the scientist at work with the CRADA with Lumileds to improve LS output and yield) had his annual review last week. One of the 'slides' in his talk had the point, 'humans want kilo lumens for a typical room'. It's easy to do the math on cost and size to do that with LEDs. We could do it currently with a hundred LSs or so...

FWIW, he maintains that the 'solution' is OLEDs for general light (whole walls or ceilings) with LEDs as local light. That's the DOE 'take' at any rate.

Doug Owen