jml1149

Hi All-


Seems like every post I read about DIY LED on the interweb uses CREE lights. While not a bad LED, people should at least consider the Philips Luxeon light here:

http://www.luxeonstar.com/

There are several advantages. The Luxeon lights are significantly brighter, consume the same power, have many various avaliable lenses, and offer a neat tri-star package where you specify three LED's and they solder them onto one chip. Other places I have seen LED's for sale, Cool White is listed as just Cool White. But that's actually quite a large spectrum of colors. This site gives you closer to the actual color temperature which can help make outcomes more consistent. And, maybe it's only a matter of my aestethic preference, but I prefer squares to stars.

I'll also add that I have no vested interest in any of these companies. But I am a lighting engineer for a major defense contractor, and work extensively with LED lighting applications on a regular basis. In some older aircraft lighting applications, the old-school bulbs last a total of 10 hours before requiring replacement. LED technology has not only exceeded the military specifications for lighting characteristic, at 1/16th the power consumption, but increase bulb life to 50k hours. It's pretty neat stuff.




Cheers!