New energy saving LED bulb

I know there have already been some tentative steps into the market to produce an LED incandescent replacement but I think this sounds very interesting.

Two things I thought made this different:

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Lighting Science said an ODL R-30 bulb consumes only 5.6 watts and can replace 65-watt incandescent and 15-watt fluorescent bulbs. Compared to existing incandescent units, the ODL lamps reduce energy usage by almost 90% for the same end lumens, with a useful life up to 25 times longer (50,000 hours).


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and

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Another drawback to LEDs, color shift, was solved by using red, green, and blue LEDs to produce a white light.
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Capable of emitting either warm white or ambient light....


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I wonder if the bulb has a sensor that can adjust the color to match ambient light. In any case a bulb that emits the user's choice of color temperatures is one area I long thought where LEDs would shine (pun intended). This would make it cheaper to sell and produce these since only one model of each size would need to be stocked, instead of multiple color temperatures as with current CFLs.

Cost is $33.

SCWEEEEEET

I am not so sure about the claims. IIRC, a 60 watt Incan is nominally 1,000 lumens, and 5 watts of LED, regardless of the supplier / configuration, is < 200 lumens.

Note the "Lighting Science said" part. I am very skeptical with reports like this and typically take them with a grain of salt because companies like to toss out these reports to lure people into investing in them at times. If this were really true they could list the Lumen output instead of roughly comparing it to other bulbs YET listing the exact (5.6 watts) it takes..... interesting their precision in mentioning that and utter vagueness and general estimate on the output claim.

When people toss out facts readily yet generalize and estimate and suggest upon what would be the real selling point it approches that of late night infomercials IMO.

Just my two cents.

I was going to say that the 90% energy savings are BS (assuming that it actually produces the same lumen output as a 60 W bulb), since the best white LEDs today are still about the same efficiency as the best incandescents. But this one seems to use a combination of monochromatic LEDs, which are considerably more efficient than incandescent lamps. Ninety percent still sounds fishy, however.

This is the spot light version:

They also have a T shape flood light version.

Here are more information:
Product Brochure
Briefing Paper
FAQ

I just noticed something rereading that article... the compare their LED *bulb* to an R-30 floodlamp.
I had to look up what an R-30 was after they priced it at 3.50 cents. The flourescent *flood* lamps are not that great at all because it is hard to reflect the light with a small mirror or optics efficiently from what I have seen.

Does this mean it is a directional or focused design and not a standard onmidirectional lamp? If so it usefulness just
dropped off dramatically at that price since most people that light by floodlamps have to use several of them to cover an area could cost you more than a few hundred to light your house at 33 bucks apiece.

I asked some where here if you guys had used a led light in your house electrical system.

I bought an led house hold lamp from ccrane. It was like 70 bucks I think and is suppose to draw a few watts. It is a spot like light since the leds are mounted on a disk that is sealed in eproxy. They use brillant white leds with a bluish or purplish color. It seems to get a bit warm for the small amount of power it uses. IT also puts out a spot beam about the same diameter of the disk the lights are moutned on. Its ok for a reading lamp in close use, but I tried it as a light in my other fixtures, but it was too dim and the light too focused in one area.

I have seen many attempts at making an led light bulb online. Some used leds in many different mountings like a triangle configuration to give 360 degrees of light, solid colors, multi color leds, etc. I have been eyeing the led nightlight replacement bulb ccrane sells. It is basically a small screw in bulb that has a mini wedge on top and i believe 3 surface mount white leds that are angled to give 360 degrees of brightness.

I was also a bit suspicious of the claims, which is why I started this thread. I'm curious of other people's opinions of this. If it's a spotlight, and it's compared to other spotlights, then the claims aren't so far fetched but they're not entirely true, either. 65 watt, 120VAC incandescents aren't terrible efficient to start with, even when they're omnidirectional. Most are 10 lm/W and under. Once you try to focus the light so as to make a spotlight, probably 25% of your light is lost. Therefore, a 65W spotlight is lucky to put out 400 lumens, maybe 450 on a good day. Now take a 15W CFL spotlight. The CFL puts out perhaps 900 lumens unfocused. Fluorescent tubes are notoriously difficult to focus, so if you're lucky maybe half the light goes where you want it. The rest gets absorbed or scattered. You're down to roughly the output of the incandescent spotlight-400 to 450 lumens.

Now let's take this LED spotlight. The output has to be at least 400 lumens or the claims are completely bogus. This means an efficiency of over 70 lm/W. Unfortunately, even most production colored LEDs aren't there yet. Best I've heard for a green LED is 65 to 70 lm/W using Cree's new 9mW 525 nm die (I started a thread on that a while back). So far, so good. We run into problems with the other two colors. I don't think we've yet made reds with efficiencies much over about 45 lm/W. Cree's new blue LED die has an light conversion efficiency of 28%, but because the human eye is not sensitive to blue light, this works out to ~20 lm/W at most. Average these out and you get 45 lm/W-better than nearly all production white LEDs, about as good as Nichia's latest 5mm LED. Even if the proportions of green and red were increased, it's hard to see how you would get much above about 55 lm/W and still be able to call the output "white". IMO, if we're lucky this LED spotlight puts out 300 lumens, and 200 to 250 is more likely. It can claim to equal maybe a 7W to 10W CFL spotlight or a 30W to 40W incandescent spotlight, but nothing more. Energy savings relative to an incandescent are closer to 80% rather than 90%, and it only has such a large advantage because it's focused light rather than omnidirectional light. LEDs do have a 10 fold or better efficiency advantage over incandescent when we're talking about colored light, but for white light generation the best production white LEDs (~45 lm/W) are maybe 50% better than the best incandescents (~30 lm/W).

Regardless of the bogus claims, it is nice to see some pioneering steps in the direction of using LEDs for general lighting. And it will be only a matter of time before LEDs really can save 90% over incandescents, and not just with spotlights.

for 33 bucks you could order about 100 or so generic white LEDS and wire them together with resistors to a light bulb base and have your own flood lamp that takes about 7-10 watts of power so I don't see this saving much money over using plain white LEDs vs doing the RGB thing which may cause some weird color output in the flood.