A while back I blogged about a LED disco floor, and mentioned that I thought LED’s would change how we light our world. JT asked me why I thought that, and I responded a little, and the next day saw an article on Slashdot about LEDs which went into FAR more detail that I had.
I won’t go into huge detail, since I’m going to link to an article that does, but here are some choice tidbits:
- Some guys made a faux neon light out of LEDs that continued to work after being shot with a shotgun. Breakage is the number one problem with neon lights. Unfortunately, one of the advantages of neon lights is the ease with which a single sign can be made, while a single LED sign would be cost prohibitive.
- LEDs can’t make white light, so until blue ones were made in the 1990’s, they were kind of worthless for lighting a living space. But now with blue ones, they can make white light by combining them with red and green ones and get white light. Additionally, since it’s multiple colors lights, you can adjust the light source for an almost infinite range of colors.
- LEDs currently in development have been made to be 6 times as efficient as an incandescent bulb. Current white LEDs will last up to 50,000 hours, about 50 times as long
as a 60-watt bulb. That’s almost six years if they’re on constantly.
