Future of the Luxeon III and Luxeon V?

Hello,

I am not the most technically versed or up to date on LED technology. I ran into a thread here
that offered thoughts that upcoming Luxeon III LEDs would perhaps make the Luxeon V LED obsolete, because of cost and other factors. Having used both Luxeon III and Luxeon V LED lights, it is hard to imagine a Luxeon III putting out as much light as a Luxeon V, but I don't really know much about what might be on the drawing board for the near future.

Did some web searches on emerging LED technology without a lot of success.

Can anyone give me an idea about what might be happening with Luxeon III emitters in the near and intermediate future? For the moment, the Surefire L5 has about the best beam I have used for amount of light and some throw. Thanks.

I expect Lumileds to start producing the high-efficiency dies they've been experimenting with in the lab. I hear they've been getting 50 lm/W lately, so could see near "X-bin" performance from a single-die 3W device soon.

In the more distance future, perhaps Lumileds will release some new packages. The Luxeon line is not so well suited to modern PCB fabrication techniques, so perhaps they'll produce a SMT package for the Luxeon. They might also look at some really high-power packages in the neighborhood of 20W for general-purpose illumination, but this seems iffy since the external heatsinking requirements for such a package would be excessive.

Well, hopefully they do something soon, they are about to be overran from multiple fronts at once.

Besides, the lab guys don't seem to have been doing much at all over the past 5 years. A couple new releases, some tweaks (yawn), but nothing ground shaking, nor fixing their huge flop, and the customers having to take them to task on the very short lifetime on the Lux V.