LED’s or Light Emitting Diodes are electronics components that have been around for quite some time in the area of consumer electronics and other products. They were previously restricted to applications such as the power indicators on your gizmo’s and gadgets and other low power devices which makes it such an alluring prospect for the lighting needs of tomorrow. May it be in the home, at work or for applications such as ambient lighting, LED’s are being developed a step further for one key factor that makes them quite unique, low power consumption.
Older incandescent bulbs did a great job from the time they were introduced and are still preferred by many due to some factors such as the warm light that they emit. The only downside is that they consume a lot of power for as all of us know, these bulbs tend to get quite hot. Heat is a form of wasted energy when seen in terms of lighting applications for the home and elsewhere. Only 40% of the energy they consume is converted to the level of light that is useful to us and the rest is wasted. Newer fluorescent bulbs had a higher light output than the older incandescent bulbs but the initial starting and warm-up process consumes a whole lot of power and turning them on and off tends to shorten their life considerably. They do produce a whole lot more light in a sense that a 9 Watt compact fluorescent has an equal light output of a 40 to 60 Watt incandescent bulb.
In comes LED bulbs which has an output of more than 80% light converted from the power it consumes. Companies such as Philips, C.Crane, LEDLight.com have devoted a whole arm of their industrial bases for the development of the said products based on LED’s have been successful and are expanding their applications in industry to levels never thought of in the past. One of the newer users of these lighting systems are museums who have noticed their advantages such as low heat radiation and lower power consumption for their displays and decorative structural lighting systems. The automotive industry has begun to use these bulbs which have a longer lifespan than the traditional bulbs and tend to give out a constant amount of light even when power from the battery is low. Fixtures such as drop-in replacements for traditional bulbs have been developed and are currently being sold worldwide that use the same connectors and plugs without a need for conversion. Digital cameras have used high-output white LED’s for flash and lighting use that allowed them to use less power compared to traditional flash bulbs.
Price is still the major deterrent for their widespread use but they are getting lower by the day and the cost benefit analyses of savings that would be a result of less power consumption tends to off set the initial cost of equipment purchase and implementation. So be assured of more and more applications for these electronic lighting fixtures in the future.