OLEDs from Osram Offer Optimized Occular….uh….Did I say They’re Transparent?

It’s been awhile since I posted hasn’t it? Sorry. I had a baby in there somewhere and then the holidays came up. It’s good to be back. Well, looks like I missed that Osram is making some noise in the OLED industry with their new high-performance OLEDs that put out 20 lumens per watt with a brightness of 1000 candela per square meter (thats 1000 Nits for all you screen people out there). The really neat features here are that these white OLEDs are transparent (nearly) when off or on. Currently they’re about 55% transparent but Osram is looking to bump that up to 75% with further development. Light output for each side of the OLED can be individually controlled. Think of putting these things into cubicle walls so that during the day, they’re nearly clear like a window and at night, can emit some nice diffuse light into the cube for all your overnight “work” binges. Hey, why not have it emit tons of light OUT from the cube at night so you can get some sleep and blind anyone who comes by to check on your progress? Kewl!

Checkout the full story at LEDs Magazine

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Novaled Produces Super Efficient, Super Bright, Superlicious OLEDs

Novaled has announced that they now have OLED panels capable of producing 1,000 candela per square meter with an efficiency of 35 lumens per watt with a reported lifetime of 100,000 hours. Thats no small feat. The Color Rendering Index (CRI) was 90. The testing was done with consideration for only the forward light emissions, that is to say all light coming out the back and the sides of the panel was blocked. This accurately mimics a real-world application since these are almost exclusively used ad backlights. Evidentally, they were able to crank up the brightness to 4,000 candela per square meter and the efficiency only dropped to 31lumens per watt with no change in color or CRI.

Kudos to Novaled!

Click here to read the whole story on LEDS Magazine

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Cree To Install Cree LEDs In Cree’s Facilities

Cree announced their plans to convert all lighting in their headquarters and manufacturing facility to lighting fixtures with Cree XLamp LEDs.

I don’t know…..does anybody else out there feel like Cree’s announcement to adopt LED lighting in their headquarters and manufacturing facility seems a bit odd? Don’t you feel like Cree should have already been using LEDs everywhere? I mean, the CEO should have XLamps surgically implanted in his forehead. Hay! Headlamps! Get it? <insert groans here> That was my initial reaction and I suspect that might be the initial reactions of a lot of people, including Cree’s customers.

Releasing this announcement to the newswire does illustrate Cree’s commitment to developing efficient LED technology that will eventually replace traditional lighting but at the same time it highlights the fact that LED luminaires are fairly new and LED technology costly (initially)as compared to traditional lamps which is something that not even Cree, who makes the darn things, could ignore ,further illustrating that Cree hasn’t been using them which can be disconcerting to customers. On a more positive note: Kudos to Cree for launching the LED Workplace website (www.ledworkplace.org) which looks like it will be a terrific place to exchange information about LED luminaire data and cost savings on workplace LED installations.

Also, in the release it says “in total the new LED lights use 48% less energy than the incandescent, fluorescent and high-pressure sodium lights they replaced” Uh…commercially available Cree XLamp LEDs are not more efficient then HP Sodium lights and produce nowhere near as much light over as broad an area. I don’t think we’ll be seeing LEDs replace sodium vapor lamps anytime soon. Perhaps chock that up to an over-zealous PR writer?

Click here to read the full announcement at LEDs Magazine

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What is the Current Market Price for LED Under Cabinet Lighting

Calling all sales and marketing personnel….Calling all sales and marketing personnel!

Well, sales & marketing personnel in the under cabinet lighting industry anyway.

I want to pose a question to you all: What is the current market price for LED under cabinet lighting? Obviously there is high-end and low-end markets. I am interested in the market price for high-end LED under cabinet lighting. The reason I ask is that my company has a new LED under cabinet lighting fixture called the Illumaled under cabinet lighting system which is now hitting the retail and commercial distribution channels and just as it is, I am hearing buzz that the pricepoint for LED under cabinet lighting which had been about $80 per unit has now fallen to around $40 – $50 per unit. The source of the information had a product that came in at around $80 per unit and had been selling for awhile but sales have dropped dramatically which they suspect was due to the price point drop. I suspect that my source for the information is actually targeting a lower-end market since they mention the installation was for multi-unit housing.

Has anyone heard anything from distribution channels about the current market price for high-end or low-end (if there even is such a thing due to the current cost of LED lighting in general) LED cabinet lighting? What are you hearing out there?

I’m going to try and make this post sticky for awhile to give everyone a chance to see it and comment. Thanks!

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Final Energy Star Requirements for SSL Released

Hey! The DOE issued it’s final Energy Star criteria for solid-state-lighting products effective 30SEPT2007! Shoot on over to my Architectural Lighting Blog to read the whole story and get a copy of the requirements!

Got LED Lighting? Amusement Parks Need To See The Light

Here’s a question for all you LED gurus out there: Why don’t amusement parks use LEDs on their rides?

I just came back from a trip to a locally famous (i.e. not Disney or Six Flags etc..) amusement park that has been operating since 1902 and they just recently put in some fantastic new rides and I was shocked to see that these rides that are 1 – 2 years old at the most, have hundreds to thousands of big honking colored light bulbs and on some of these rides, half of the bulbs were burned out already! This made them look ugly and cheesy. This was the case all over the park.
In some applications, like automobile headlights, the switch to LEDs just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense but for an amusement park, at least to me (not being a amusement park owner) it makes all the sense in the world. Amusement parks operate at extreme expense and so are always looking for ways to cut costs. It would seem to me that switching to LEDs would save the an enormous bundle of change just on the energy savings alone. Then theres the huge maintenance bill that light bulbs carry. These things are blinking and flashing which, for a light bulb, shortens it’s life to around 2000 hours (maybe less) and now you have to replace them and hire people to do it. So imagine how many people it takes and how long it takes when you have thousands of these things and many of them are 10, 20, 50 or more feet up in the air (this probably explains why the don’t change them often)! So with the switch to flashing LEDs, you get a lifecycle of about 20000 – 50000 hours: a huge difference and a tremendous cost savings. Of course all this has to be weighed against the cost of retro-fitting the existing lamps to LEDs but is there really an excuse for the amusement ride manufacturers to not utilize LEDs when their building these things? It would seem to me that it would be a huge selling point. Now with the advent of direct screw and pin lamp LED replacement, there really isn’t much of an excuse even for the amusement parks to not replace the lamps even weighed against the much higher cost of purchase for the LED lamps versus the traditional light bulbs (what’s a box of small colored lamps cost?). If these parks can get 30 million dollar loans to build new rides, they can get 1 or 2 million dollars loans to replace their lamps. The short-sighted may say well thats not going to sell tickets but I beg to differ. People may not realize it when their looking around but the clean, modern, and fully-working appearance that LEDs will afford will increase ticket sales as much as picking up litter on the pathways will. Plus, over time, the LEDs will pay for themselves (often in the first year or two as evidenced by several large building retrofit projects that have made the news lately. See my Architectural Lighting Blog) and then some.

This doesn’t even begin to touch all the accent lighting, emergency lighting, signage etc… that amusement parks continue to use traditional light bulbs in (although I did see some LED in-roads in the parks signage but not a whole lot). Just think of all the potential savings!

End rant.

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Nano-sized UV Leds

New Fabrication Technique Yields Nanoscale UV LEDs
It’s really neat when the rest of the world is all a buzz about super high-brightness LEDs and LED modules that are big and bright enough to burn you facial silhouette into concrete that the boys at NIST, University of Maryland, and Howard University have cooked up nano-sized LEDs. Nanotechnology is still one of those voodoo technologies that has only realized limited commercial success in a very limited selection of applications but, perhaps, with the advent of nano-sized solid-state lighting that may change. Interesting that UV was the chosen wavelength. Since 365 nm is a typical UVA phototherapy wavelength, maybe medical applications should be included on the list of viable uses for these things. I envision doctors releasing into the bloodstream an army of nano-robots equipped with nano-scale UV LEDs capable of treating persistent skin conditions with micro-bursts of locally concentrated UV, internally! How cool is that? Well, I’m guessing we’re a long ways away from anything like that but it’s fun to think about.

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LED Scanners – No, it’s not a horror movie.

Epson has just announced that it will begin production of an all LED illuminated photo scanner shortly. Their Perfection V500 scanner will use white LEDs for the scanning illumination instead of the typical fluorescents we all know and have to deal with. The biggest impact is that these devices can be switched on and produce high-quality scans cold without any warm-up period typical of the fluorescent-based scanners. I personally cannot stand waiting the 45 seconds for my scanner to warm up so this is very exciting news for me. I need to get out more.

Article via LIGHTimes Online

Semiconductor Company Hopes To Bring Down Cost to Manufacture LEDs

Infused With Cash, Group IV Semiconductor Accelerates Development Of Energy-Efficient Solid State Lighting

The gist of this great article from The Energy Blog kind of ties in to my previous article about how as manufacturing technology paces forward, LED output increases along with efficacy usually dropping the cost of the LEDs to the solid-state lighting product manufacturers. It even briefly mentions the Compact Fluorescent Market (CFL) which I touched on in my previous article. Check it out!

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US Department of Energy Races to Put Standards In Place for Solid-State Lighting

Solid-State Lighting: DOE SSL Commercial Product Testing Program
The US Department of Energy along with industry groups like the Solid-State Lighting Program t RPI are moving quickly to develop standards and testing procedures for solid-state lighting products. They have started a commercial product testing program to help with their own planning for their various research programs and industry support programs like ENERGY STAR®. More importantly, the DOE’s work on this front will provide and through whatever standards and procedures they adopt, force manufacturers to provide accurate product performance information to the public in regards to SSL products. This is particularly important in these formative years for the solid-state lighting industry since it will build up and help maintain confidence that new solid-state lighting products are performing as stated by the manufacturers.

The results of the DOE’s first three rounds of SSL product testing are very interesting and worth taking a look at (PDF format). I am a bit surprised that SSL product manufacturers, in most cases but not all, have chosen to use misleading numbers to represent the efficacy of their luminaires when we, as an industry, can look back at the same misleading behavior and resistance to standards in the compact fluorescent lamp (CFL) industry during it’s launch and use their mistakes as a guideline of “what not to do”. We, and I am speaking to all LED product manufacturers out there including my company, have to be very careful about the numbers we state for our products. Once these standards are in place, it can become embarrassing to have to suddenly drop your stated efficacies to a much lower number, undermining your OEM and customers faith in your products, because you chose to use misleading test results. As an industry, we are still in the formative years and should be looking to quickly adopt standards and procedures along with products that meet or exceed them to prevent undermining our own marketplace. Part of that is updating our products with the latest, available technology wherever substantial efficiency improvements can be realized from such a move. As is the case whenever you have rapidly improving technology and standards in place to drive them, manufacturers will often have no choice but to update to stay inline with the current standards, forgoing cost but the flip-side of fast paced technology is that improvements are eventually made in manufacturing efficiency so that cost-savings are often realized.

In the case of my own company, we like most in the industry have moved to higher output, more efficient LEDs at reduced cost than what we were paying for less efficient LEDs even a year ago, in an attempt to meet California’s Energy Efficiency Standards Title-24 and DOE guidelines for luminous efficacy in SSL products. We have seen a 25 – 30% increase in LED output for 25% less cost but are still trying to hit the Title-24 efficacy mark of 40 lumens/watt.

Every LED product manufacturer should check out the DOE’s Commercial Product Testing Program Page.

I really want to see your comments on this one. Me and my companies engineers would be very interested to get other manufacturers and consumers take on this one. Whatever segment of the industry you’re in or even if you’re not, please feel free to post a comment!

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