It's official..........luxeon is now mainstream.

It\'s official..........luxeon is now mainstream.

Perhaps others have posted about this light but I was just at Lowes in Cumming, Ga and saw a Dorcy 1 watt luxeon headlamp for $19.97. The light runs on 3 AAA's, looks somewhat clunky and was right there at the checkout counter. They also had some mispriced at 14.97. FYI, alongside the headlamp was the zenon dorcy spider (119 lumens) also selling for 19.97. I imagine that it will be difficult to find an incandescent light within the next 5 years.

Re: It\'s official..........luxeon is now mainstream.

Someone did.

Back in like January, the luxeons were found on the shelf with the Browning brand on the light.

This Dorcy headlamp even has circuitry in it...

Re: It\'s official..........luxeon is now mainstrea

Any idea how much a Luxeon costs in huge quantity these days? I mean the cheapest possible configuration, not some exotic flashaholic specialty part selected for flux and color. I think a typical 1 watt PR flashlight bulb is in the 5 cent range, so LED's probably have a long way to go.

Re: It\'s official..........luxeon is now mainstrea

Until the luxeons get down to under $1.00 each for flashlight manufacturers in quantity to put in lights and LED drive circuits get down to 50 cents for boosting 2 cell lights
there will still be plenty of incandescent lights out there. Most people are not flashaholics and buy what is cheap and LED lights are still not there yet. When you can buy a 2 cell LED light that puts out near as much light as a cheap 2D or 2AA plastic light for the same price incandescent lights will soon vanish I figure. Right now the premier LED manufacturers got a stranglehold on the market on all but the 5mm lights and until you get generic luxeon and nichia type 1W+ LEDs in mass manufacture I dont see prices falling fast. Kind of like the original IBM PC.. and intel processor chips in the 80s... prices didn't go anywhere till the clone PC and CHip makers started competing big time. I hope we get serious competition in the high power LED arena to drive profits and prices down and production sky high, perhaps incandescent light manufacturers will have to come up with new groundbreaking technology then to keep from losing their jobs completely. I await the day we have super high power LED headlights in the range of 100 watts that are instantly variable automatically instead of the auto dimming lights now. with optics you could probably run them brighter and not blind drivers oncoming.

Re: It\'s official..........luxeon is now mainstrea

Lumileds did themselves no favors with the Luxeon packaging - you can't solder luxeons using many popular automated methods, nor can you treat them like most SMD components.

Nichia's and Cree's high-power offerings are SMD components, so one might look to them for affordable mass-produced high-power LED lights.

Re: It\'s official..........luxeon is now mainstrea

with Dorcy, perhaps there is hope!

i am always impressed with my little AAA LED...and $20 for luxeon is getting pretty nice!

Bob

Re: It\'s official..........luxeon is now mainstrea

I think the heat problems of high power LED lights drive up prices also. If they can figure out how to turn the heat into light based radiation like incandescent lights you could put them into cheap plastic bodies instead of having to to spend time milling aluminum bodies which takes time and costs a lot more than molding plastic. If some genius can figure out how to conduct heat and vent it using just plastic and patent it he could make Bill Gates envious.

Re: It\'s official..........luxeon is now mainstrea

[ QUOTE ]
idleprocess said:
Lumileds did themselves no favors with the Luxeon packaging - you can't solder luxeons using many popular automated methods, nor can you treat them like most SMD components.

Nichia's and Cree's high-power offerings are SMD components, so one might look to them for affordable mass-produced high-power LED lights.

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Don't forget OSRAM SMD Golden Dragons.

All of these seem to be first round type LEDs, I can't wait until they get their next rounds out. None of them can compete yet with the LumiLEDs white for an even beam.

LumiLEDs has a new development to stay out in front of the market that should be out by early 2005.

Lynx_ARC, there are fairly high thermally conductive plastics already, but they cost more.

Re: It\'s official..........luxeon is now mainstrea

[ QUOTE ]
Lynx_Arc said:
I think the heat problems of high power LED lights drive up prices also. If they can figure out how to turn the heat into light based radiation like incandescent lights you could put them into cheap plastic bodies instead of having to to spend time milling aluminum bodies which takes time and costs a lot more than molding plastic. If some genius can figure out how to conduct heat and vent it using just plastic and patent it he could make Bill Gates envious.

[/ QUOTE ]
While this doesn't directly address what you're implying, there is a very easy way to deal with the heat problems of LEDs, and eventually LEDs will only need minimal heatsinking. The answer is simple-increase efficiency. When efficiency is at 50% (instead of the current 10%), you only have about 1/9 the waste heat for a given amount of light, or about 5/9ths the waste heat for a given power input. For 90% efficiency the respective figures are 1/81 and 1/9. Assuming you can eventually approach 100% light conversion efficiency (no inherent reason in LED technology why you can't), you'll have practically zero waste heat, meaning plastic bodies will work just fine. Maybe that's not the answer for right now, but far better for LED manufacturers to focus on increasing efficiency rather than worrying about waste heat. Eventually the higher efficiency will make the waste heat problem large moot.

Now what does Lumileds have in store for 2005 to stay ahead of Cree and Nichia? Are they going to incorporate that 60 lm/W techhnology which they are sharing with Nichia into their high-powered LEDs? If so, I'll hold off buying Luxeons until then. An LIII putting out >150 lumens @ 700 mA would be sweet.

Re: It\'s official..........luxeon is now mainstrea

the problem with researching is unless you get a great breakthrough the costs have to be absorbed by the selling of the product and lets face it... there isn't enough production of high power LEDs as it is, production and cost are tied together, if you raise production you can spread out development costs at the same time and I would bet if prices dropped 20% on those LEDS people would buy 20% or more of them. They need to figure out how to crank out what they are already making easier and cheaper so their profits will speed up research. it is only when the price of the LED gets down to near the price of making an aluminmum flashlight body that ight makers will really get more interested in the cheaper plastic light market so heat is probably less an issue than price for the time being.
If they do get the heat figured out and/or efficiency increased then they can probably start making lights with the light output of todays 8 watts worth of Luxeon leds by piling 8 of them in them the size of a 2D flashlight thereabouts. Who knows? 5 years from now maybe there is a battery breakthrough also increasing capacity by 2-3x while dropping the price to nimh cell range. I want a micro 100 watt torch the size of a 1AA cell light using a fusion cell battery with a life of 50 years. Makes you wonder if someday LEDS will get so powerful they have to regulate the production because they could be used as lasers by some people with a vendetta.

Re: It\'s official..........luxeon is now mainstrea

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Lynx_Arc said:
Makes you wonder if someday LEDS will get so powerful they have to regulate the production because they could be used as lasers by some people with a vendetta.

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Sometime in the future we'll have 200 lm/W LEDs which can be run at maybe 10 watts while generating no more waste heat than today's Luxeon IIIs. That's 2000 lumens in a very small package. Given that staring at an unfocused Q-bin 1 watt Luxeon putting out maybe 35 lumens is painful, one can imagine that 2000 lumens focused into a 5° beam (this would be ~300,000 cp) would be a pretty potent weapon if shined into someone's eyes. However, we have incandescent spotlights now which have hotspots of several million cp, and nobody has yet started making regulations to limit their output. As long as we flashaholics aren't stupid enough to constantly shine our super bright LED lights into everyone's eyes or windows we should be safe from big brother. BTW, 2000 lumens and 300,000 cp is about what a locomotive headlight puts put. /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/ooo.gif It would be funny to be able to get that from a device which can easily fit in your pocket.

Re: It\'s official..........luxeon is now mainstrea

Here are the guts of the Dorcy Headlamp:

Re: It\'s official..........luxeon is now mainstrea

If I had to bet money, I would say U1 (which is epoxied over) is a Zetex ZXSC300 or 310 (assuming of course that the big thing in the center is an inductor).

Re: It\'s official..........luxeon is now mainstrea

I must be wrong but the thing in the center looks like s switch

Re: It\'s official..........luxeon is now mainstrea

[ QUOTE ]
NewBie said:
Lynx_ARC, there are fairly high thermally conductive plastics already, but they cost more.

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They probably cost more than just making an aluminum body for a flashlight which defeats over half the purpose of using plastic, although it would be neat to use if it is lighter and you can mold it into some cool shapes for making lights.

<font color="red"> jtr1962 </font> if you have NO heat at all from an LED die then you can pile them in there and possibly with optics (maybe even fiber optics too) focus perhaps 100-1000 LED dies in a package the size of a quarter. Adding these up and proper focusing could get you a whopper of a light beam for sure maybe even a pocket locomotive stomper.... just add a noise chip that sound like a train coming and you can scare the socks off your friends, enemies too. Who needs a noisemaker keychain to scare off rapists etc, just have the woman drop a train on them from a dorcy keychain light.. /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif