I'm sharing this even though it annoys me because that Livermore Light puts out like no illumination and never has, much like these fucking things that everybody hip now insists I must use: I have two close friends that are cinematographers. They care a lot about light. I damn near got into fisticuffs with them over the "evils" of LED streetlights because, you see, they really like that piss yellow look: Fuck you, Collateral. So now, because you can't buy regular Edison plugs, the whole world is busily buying fuckin' ancient carbon filament bulbs, and everyone is freaking out about ZOMG the poor light bulb and fuck you, lightbulb. This is easy. STOP BUYING EDISON PLUG BULBS. A lighbulb that screws in is automatically a shitty lightbulb. You're buying an electrical appliance designed to emulate a consumable. Get your fucking life out of those fucking bulbs. There's a goddamn revolution in lighting that the rest of the world is jumping the fuck on and we're here limping with our piss-yellow bulbs because we've got all these goddamn piece of shit legacy fixtures and here we are wringing our hands over the idea of the demise of the fucking lightbulb when you know what? That chandelier is going to be out of fashion long before it dies. And we're here talking about Philips Hue, which lets your phone control the color of your $60 lightbulb for those 20 minutes before you realize you've never needed to control your lightbulb color. See, the Asians don't care about brand name. Philips does. The cost difference between an LED lightbulb from Philips and the cost difference between the ones I buy off Amazon is all brand name, and it's about $6 per MR16. And I love Philips. They own (and have abandoned) nearly every groundbreaking display and illumination patent in the world. But if I can buy my Forever Bulbs for $2 ea instead of $8 ea I'ma do it. We now live in a world where "light" can be whatever you want it to be. And in that world, the discussion isn't obsolescence - the discussion is creativity. And I fucking love it.
“You can buy bulbs on eBay that are of such low quality that, when you screw them in, you can actually get a shock,” Hoelzenbein said. He’s heard reports from China of people buying bargain L.E.D. light bulbs by the kilogram, knowing some would last and others might not work at all.
That had never occurred to me. My goal now is to figure out better lighting solutions for my living room before I need to replace my next bulb. Why is my lamp shaped like it is? Because it was designed to keep hands and flammable material away from a bulb pumping out 97 watts of heat and channel that heat up and away from the bulb. So why do I use the same lamp for a light that puts out five watts of heat?This is easy. STOP BUYING EDISON PLUG BULBS.
I know a guy trying to make glow-in-the-dark kudzu to solve the problem of unlighted backroads by turning the south into fairyland. I'd love to see him succeed. I get the appeal of creative lighting. The prospect of LED bulbs being crippled or, worse, only smart bulbs that spy on you being available is still ungood. That was why I posted the article, because it's a case of the business model getting in the way of the technology that isn't completely esoteric, and that's a conflict that's often invisible unless you're in the thick of it.
There are devices that want to talk to the Internet. They have been talking to the Internet for years. The IoT is very just glue some gears on it.
Are there more conservative styles as well? That swirling chandelier looks great, but I could see it quickly becoming dated. While the wood one is much more conservative, I could see it having similar problems as well. If I were to have an LED device in my house for 40 years, I'd want it to look good, maybe in somewayatch that wood paneling I want so much.
Yeah so now when the bulb burns out instead of replacing a $1 bulb you get to replace a $300 fixture. That $1 you saved on energy over the life time of the bulb, turned into 299 and a whole ton of extra cost. Oh and dont tell me LED's dont burn out they do, although usually the LED will outlast its shitty controller. LED's have a output degradation curve which is pretty good but after about 2-3 years of continuous use they drop to ~60 % output. For that price you can get a lot of bulbs. Also those yellow lights you see are high wattage HPS bulbs. They are very efficient in energy use but im sure most of that is eaten by replacement/service costs. Its gotta be pretty pricy to pay someone to go up there and replace the bulbs every 6months/year and if you can double or triple that with LEDs thats probably worth the extra cost.
I cannot handle your pugnacious idiocy today. I use mr16s. They cost $2 more. I have some I've been using since 2007. Also, hps look like urine. I kmow all about them, their efficiency and everything else and even speaking as an astronomer I'm happy to see them go. An HPS bulb is $100 and a truck roll. An LED fixture is years and years and 10% the enrgy or less.
Uncalled for man. Im merely responding to the fancy LED fixtures that you linked that while they look amazing do no appear to have standard MR16s in them. A lot of the really cool ones have CREE XR-E or similar mounted on custom boards. While cool maintainability isnt all that great. Here is the degradation curve of LEDs Then there is the power-supply that always get omitted from the discussion. In order to drive the LED's correctly you have to have pretty clean DC power at a constant current. The circuitry for that isnt all that expensive but QC on many components is shit so its not uncommon to get flicker in LED's because there is a poorly rectified frequency in the output. Also these cheap components fail and when they do the whole thing becomes a paper weight. Finally there is the whole color spectrum problem with LEDs. As im sure you are aware white LEDs are blue leds with a prizim so the color band is really narrow. Im surprised that doesn't cause you cinematography problems actually. For most application its not an issue but its worth considering. Personally i like the wide spectrum produced by Metal Halide but that's just me . As for Livermore lights, they have their place in dark places like bars and certain coffee shops where you dont want to deal with fancy fixtures and its easier to put them in and get the ambiance you want than to do something else. Id never have them in my house though.I cannot handle your pugnacious idiocy today.
im guessing these are IDEAL curves based on perfect heat management. If you drive them hard in a hot environment its significantly worse.
Not all types of LED are so fragile. GaN LED show negligible decay even with heat-sink temperature at 105 degrees Celsius when compared to one whos heat-sink maintained 55 degrees Celsius. Yes, I know that this is just a recent research paper and not something available right now, but your point regarding temperature dependence might be much less significant in the near future when compared to current state.If you drive them hard in a hot environment its significantly worse.
Eventually maybe but my point is that at the moment the tech isnt quite there and LEDs are complex, finicky and difficult to drive correctly. The article says match in the coefficient of thermal expansion It took forever to get decent 3W leds out there into the market at a resonable price. Even now 100lm/watt LEDs are pricey.It is very challenging to grow high quality GaN on Si substrates because of the huge mis-
so im guessing that means were a decade out before they are affordable.
Sorry if it came off that way. The larger point im trying to make is that LED tech isn't always a great 1:1 replacement for incandescent and that doing LEDs correctly is darn hard. Both have their places and we shouldn't use LEDs as a replacement in all applications. Also I wanted to mention that the entire advertised life of the bulb is unlikely to get realized. While the bulb has a theoretical life of 10k hours. It is unlikely to be realized due to the poor construction of the subcontinents, poor thermal management, and poor power rectification in the design. This is true for incandescents too but is much less of a problem when the bulbs are replaceable and $1 each. My third point is that a lot of great tech dies at the margins for retrofit applications. Yeah LEDs might look great on street lights and are a good choice for new construction but once you factor in retrofit costs it may be cheaper to use the existing HPS bulbs in street light fixtures. LED fixtures need to be designed from the ground up and are sensitive to all sorts of factors that incandescent lights care little about therefore initial cost is high. Also for cinematography purposes the LEDs may have a ripple flicker the really fucks up your shots so keep that in mind.
MY larger point is 1:1 replacement is pointless when I can whip out something the size of a Mars bar that puts out more light than my car's headlights. For two hours. Off a 3 hour USB charge. And LEDs are cheap. They used to not be but they're getting stupid cheap. Especially when you factor in the power savings. Grow houses became effectively invisible once LED lights became viable. Los Angeles is saving $5 a year per streetlight. The switch cost is already paid for. So yeah - LEDs aren't bulletproof and they aren't magical but they absolutely, positively kick the shit out of incandescents for almost any application. Yeah they suck ass for cinematography of any kind. The awesome part is in addition to the flicker the RGB ones have the same peaks as the CMOS most cameras use so they look all kinds of jacked. But I ain't a cinematographer so no fucks given.