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Maximum LED brightness

Via CarbonLighthouse comes an interesting discussion of just how many lumens per watt (LPW) we can theoretically get out of LED emitters. Spoiler: 683. And only at one wavelength, a practical color-changing entertainment fixture will have to contain different types of emitters at different wavelengths and the LPW will necessarily go down. At last we see the light: a light source that is 555 nanometers in wavelength and that uses one Watt of power and is 100% efficient will produce 683 lumens. Thus the efficacy of such a light would be 683 lumens per Watt. The discussion gets wonderfully technical, but it’s fascinating.

TMB Firefly

Well, TMB went and made the Firefly, a product I drew the basic idea for about a year ago, though mine was based on an EL wire instead of LEDs to get the true “glowing filament look”. The basic idea is to take a power-hungry but beautiful 3200 Kelvin light source and get the same light and look out of it with an efficient emitter like an LED. This would be pretty easy to do with a frosted bulb, which could hide and diffuse the light source, but much harder to emulate the traditional “Edison bulb” look because the visual appeal of those is based on a large, glowing filament. TMB has made an interesting hybrid using what looks like… Read More »TMB Firefly