New light

[unixronin]

So you thought LED lights were the most energy-efficient lighting coming to market, huh?  Guess again.  An outfit called Luxim has a new gas-plasma light technology they call LiFi.  The new LiFi bulb is the size of a gel capsule, and delivers 140 lumens of instant-on, very high visual quality light per watt with very little waste heat.  (Compare that to around 10-12 lumens per watt for an incandescent bulb, 13-15 for halogen, 35-40 for compact fluorescent bulbs, or about 80-90 lumens per watt for the brightest production LEDs.  Wikipedia has a handy reference table here.)

Comments

[ithildae.livejournal.com]

The problem with LEDs that no one it talking about is the heat. You can get some lovely lighting effects with LEDs, but only for short periods at, what I consider, reasonable light levels. They just tend to burn themselves out. LEDs also don't "stack" particularly well, you can't just add more for more light. I love 'em, but they just are not close enough to use.

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

So, can we buy them at the local hardware store?

(Can't buy LED units there, either.)

Also, the switch from type to type saves fewer watts each time. Going from incandescent to CF saves 60 watts, from CF to LED saves 8 watts per...

[skellington.livejournal.com]

Nifty.

I forwarded this to one of our hardware guys to see if we might use it for our display backlight.