HBLED Reality Check

High-Brightness LEDs, Incandescent Lamps and Mark Twain

by Ed Rodriguez, OptoThermal Technologies

Editor's Note: A recent editorial on the future of HBLEDs triggered letters from readers, including one from Ed Rodriguez who provided some very good counterpoint to our overly-optimistic assessment of the technology. His insights were so good, in fact, that we invited him to expand on them in the form of an article that balances the hype and rumor flowing from the solid-state lighting industry these days. While Mr Rodrigue, and the staff of analogZONE see a "bright" future for HBLEDs, this "reality check" should help you understand where the challenges, and the real opportunities, lie for these promising devices.

It's been quite a while since something besides nanotechnology has created Wall Street buzz for electronics components, but that's changed over the past couple of years with the introduction of high-brightness light emitting diodes (HBLEDs). They have captured the fancy of the engineering community as well as the consumer.

The Internet is being flooded with hundreds of rapturous press releases from HBLED makers all explaining how their new devices will render Thomas Edison's 140-year-old invention obsolete. These companies have become very adept at employing HBLED jargon: lumens; lux; candela; footcandles; color temperature; wavelength; lambertian distribution; scotopic and photopic vision… even if they are not quite clear on what it all means.

What becomes apparent is that companies often use or put emphasis on quite different specifications to describe the merits of their products. It's sort of like Ford giving mileage in miles per gallon but Toyota using meters per liter and Audi using wheel revolutions per tank full of gas, and leaving it to you to do the math to determine if product A is really better than product B. By themselves these technicalities are not the issue. The real problem is that in many cases the technology is being promoted in end-user consumer products in ways not much different from the marketing of women's cosmetic products for "eternal beauty." That is, there are probably some facts buried in there somewhere.

Compounding the confusion is the fact that there are actually very few sales or marketing people in this arena who really understand anything beyond a superficial level. Consequently it's not surprising that customers are often confused, whipsawed and otherwise befuddled by the various claims being made by the half dozen or so big HBLED vendors.

...download complete article here (64kb PDF file)