9 ms·

Philips LED bulb Tear-down

116 points by powertower 15y ago

deweller 15y ago
I would love to see something like this on the new Switch bulb coming out (supposedly) this fall. More info on the Switch bulb: http://www.slate.com/id/2298444/pagenum/all http://www.slate.com/id/2298444/pagenum/all
ErikRogneby 15y ago
Hell of a lot of components for a light bulb. The joys of achieving feature parity with the (150+ year old) incumbent product/technology.
- owenmarshall 15y ago
  I'd be interested in seeing what lightbulbs looked like if we designed them from scratch today -- without, as you note, 150+ years of expectations and needs. What could they do that the traditional old incandescent can't? What would they look like? On a more general note, does this "design in a vacuum" have any valid applications? Can this lead to ideas that we can use today, or is it just pie in the sky thinking?
  - ristretto 15y ago
    Well the bulb shape is really a relic from the past. The design has already been disrupted with fluorescent lights, that brought bigger cylindrical shapes that diffuse more.
  - ErikRogneby 15y ago
    It might look like this: http://www.adafruit.com/products/357 http://www.adafruit.com/products/357 - Buy your lighting by the foot. 12V DC may make more sense for homes these days than 115 AC. The incandescent bulb was the "killer app" for a whole power ecosystem. In older houses in places like San Francisco you sometimes find wiring going through the old gas lamp lines.
    - dmm 15y ago
      > 12V DC may make more sense for homes these days than 115 AC Have you ever sized any 12v wiring? To carry a load of 22amps 20 feet with a voltage drop of <2% with a 12V system requires 4awg wire. That's crazy big and gets very expensive. 22amps might sound like a lot and lighting may be getting more efficient, but you'll still want to run things like vacuum cleaners.
      - kragen 15y ago
        > To carry a load of 22amps 20 feet with a voltage drop of <2% with a 12V system requires 4awg wire. The wire size needed to carry a load of a specific number of amps does not vary with the voltage between that wire and some other wire somewhere. Perhaps you mean, "To carry a load equivalent to 22 amps on 120 volts, a 12-volt system needs to carry 220 amps, which requires 4AWG wire to lose less than 2% over 20 feet."
        dmm 15y ago
        > does not vary with the voltage between that wire and some other wire somewhere. I'm not following what you're saying here. I was just pointing out that voltage drop can be a significant concern with low voltage systems and controlling that can require thick wires. From my rough calculations, voltage drop at 12V over 20' of 4awg copper @ 20A is ~1.7% and @ 100A is ~8.6%.
        kragen 15y ago
        Yes, you're right. I was wrong. Thanks for explaining. My calculations are below. Hopefully you have enlightened me; please let me know if I'm still confused. 4awg wire is ¼Ω per thousand feet (6dB of resistance below 10AWG), or 0.005Ω for 20 feet. 20 amps × 0.005Ω = 0.1 volts. So the voltage drop is 0.1 volts, which is 0.8% of 12V or 0.08% of 120V. If it's 20 feet each way, it's 1.7% or 0.17%. The low-voltage gets you double: you need more amps to carry the same power (which is what I thought you were saying) and you also need thicker wire to carry the same current. So, to take a worst-case example, if you have a 900W microwave oven that can tolerate a power supply 10% lower than nominal, and you're running it on 120V 20 feet from the breaker box, you can deal with 6 volts of drop on each side of the romex, at which point you need 900/(120×.9) = 8⅓A. 6V/8⅓A = 0.72Ω, which means your wire can have up to 36Ω per thousand feet, which would be 25AWG, which is about half a millimeter across and commonly used for Ethernet. Not safe, because you're dissipating more than a watt per foot, which might set something on fire, but the microwave will still run. (For safety you'd probably use 12AWG instead, which is 2mm across, if not 10AWG.) If instead you're running a different 900W microwave off 12V, you need 900W/(12V×0.9), which is 83 amps. But you can't afford more than 0.6V drop on either side of the rails, and 0.6V/83A = 7.2mΩ, so you can't afford more than 0.36Ω per thousand feet, which is 5AWG, which is a copper bar 4.6mm in diameter, thicker than any wire in a normal person's house. Again, that's not to be safe — that's to get the microwave to work at all. You're still dissipating over a watt per foot of cable. To be safe, you need 2AWG, which is 6.5mm in diameter, and a pain in the ass to bend if you don't get stranded wire. 20 feet of copper 2AWG triple-stranded wire costs US$150, which is more than the microwave, and weighs 15 pounds.
  - Alex3917 15y ago
    "I'd be interested in seeing what lightbulbs looked like if we designed them from scratch today" The problem is that humans have coevolved with both sunlight and fire. While the shape of the lightbulb may be arbitrary, I think the fact that they provide uneven lighting and cast all sorts of shadows is probably necessary for good mental health. (Because it provides more sensory stimulation, and more closely mimics the natural environment as compared with what you would get from evenly distributing LEDs across the ceiling.)
    - stretchwithme 15y ago
      sort of like what you hear in an anechoic chamber sounds pretty unnatural with all of the normally reflected sound being absorbed.
  - bryanlarsen 15y ago
    Perhaps even more interesting would be "what would they look like if unconstrained by technology"? A lot of science fiction proposes the uniformly glowing ceiling. This would provide a very consistent & uniform light without the eye strain caused when you look directly at a point source. Another common idiom in science fiction is to replace your windows with giant transparent television sets, functioning simultaneously as window, television, telephone, artwork and light bulb.
    - Joeri 15y ago
      Transparent OLED has the potential to produce glowing wall panels, and transparent screens. http://www.ledsmagazine.com/news/6/10/19 http://www.ledsmagazine.com/news/6/10/19 http://www.geeky-gadgets.com/samsung-transparent-oled-display-notebook-07-01-2010/ http://www.geeky-gadgets.com/samsung-transparent-oled-displa...
    - juiceandjuice 15y ago
      With this phosphor plastic you could make some really rad rail lighting. Imagine two long strips with the phosphor on your ceiling in your room.
  - ChuckMcM 15y ago
    Lots of good suggestions here. GE has 'light panels' [1] and one of the things which I am sure we'll see for 'installed' lighting will be 'sky ceilings' that would be a ceiling covered with OLED panels arranged seamlessly which mimic the 'sky' when you are outdoors, providing night views with stars, twilight colors, etc. Probably won't be the 'common' implementation however. Generally I think one thing that will survive will be 115V ac power distribution. Its got a lot going for it in terms of installed base and understanding its transmission properties. The means LED based lighting will always have some circuitry to rectify and regulate that voltage. Of course they may evolve so it rectifies it to 135v dc and then runs off that. I enjoyed the psychology comment as well. There were some comments that gas didn't give that 'homey hearth fire' smell when burned back when people were switching from wood fireplaces over to gas. Even without constraint, I think you will find lighting fixtures don't change too much. You've got area lights and directional lights. The designers will have fun with them, glowing coils, maybe pillows that glow. But a good reading light puts out a uniform beam of light that can be directed easily to your lap. A good area light provides a widely dispersed light without being impossible to look at. Those constraints won't change because the technology has. [1] http://www.ge.com/products_services/lighting.html http://www.ge.com/products_services/lighting.html
- cjdavis 15y ago
  Meanwhile the >75% reduction in power usage and >800% increase in lifetime are features that have surpassed the incumbent (which are what makes the $40 cost affordable - a feature they are no where near approaching..)
- jonknee 15y ago
  Parity? It uses less energy, exhausts less head and lasts orders of magnitude longer.
  - marshray 15y ago
    But even parity was not achieved by CFLs, particularly for dimmable applications. It seems like the latest generation achieving parity (where the CFLs failed to) with the century-old technology is the notable point, more so than by how much they surpassed it. If that makes any sense.
    - ars 15y ago
      You can use CCFL's instead. They are fully dimmable, instant on (no warmup period), and last 25,000 hours.
      - nitrogen 15y ago
        I've done some searching for CCFLs and it seems very few people are making and selling them, and they only carry 2700K warm white. Can you recommend a good place to buy high-lumen CCFLs that have a more neutral temperature?
  - ErikRogneby 15y ago
    Required parity features: bulb form factor, warm white light, dimmable, runs off 115V AC source, screws in to existing sockets. Feature enhancement: long life.
    - colanderman 15y ago
      Ummmmmmmmmmmmmm.... I'm pretty sure incandescent bulbs, being a pioneering technology, got to dictate four of those requirements (bulb form factor, triac-based dimmer circuits, 115 V AC, socket form). The final one, "warm white light", is not a feature incandescent bulbs had 150 years ago.
    - jan_g 15y ago
- digikata 15y ago
  For all the complexity, it's a lot more efficient. Some of the complexity problem comes from adapting LED to design decisions made for incandescent AC lighting in the switches, dimmers, sockets, and power supply. If it were worth it for the user to rewire their house, they could likely get overall simpler and more reliable LED lighting. There's a parallel to software design, one often incurs complexity when optimizing or adapting one software approach to another. The system might be more reliable overall if you can re-align the entire design, but there's a cost involved in it that might not make it worth it (particularly for physical things with replication costs).
- pilgrim689 15y ago
  Here's another feature an LED light bulb offers: high-bandwidth data transfer. http://www.ted.com/talks/harald_haas_wireless_data_from_every_light_bulb.html http://www.ted.com/talks/harald_haas_wireless_data_from_ever...
maukdaddy 15y ago
Does the use of connectors imply that users could replace failed LED boards instead of trashing the entire bulb? Or even upgrading to more efficient LED boards?
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- sixtofour 15y ago
  I'm sure it's no usable serviceable parts. The article's author had to destroy the bulb to get in and take pictures.
- ChuckMcM 15y ago
  It means its possible, it doesn't mean that the owner could do it. It would be good PR on phillip's part to include a postage paid mailing label that would let you recycle dead bulbs. They could recover most of it and save both e-waste and the energy cost of casting a new heatsink.
  - ars 15y ago
    The energy cost of individually mailing a heavy bulb is greater than the energy cost of casting a heatsink. Centralized recycling might work, but not a postage paid mailer. Plus who is going to successfully store a mailer for 10 years while waiting for the bulb to burn out. And in 10 years they won't want this bulb back, there won't be anything reusable in it. Just recycle it for the metal.
    - gregable 15y ago
      Storing the mailer isn't a big problem. When I buy a new bulb, I'll get a new mailer. I toss the first round. I don't disagree with you on the energy cost though.
- nate_meurer 15y ago
  This is a brilliant idea. Absolutely brilliant. My biggest reservation about buying LEDs now isn't the price; it's that the lights that will be available next year will be twice as good, and I can't stand the thought of discarding an entire bulb in order to upgrade. It makes no sense to me that the actual LED is inseparable from its quarter-pound aluminium and plastic shroud. A lightbulb should allow you to swap out some small component that includes the LED die and perhaps the driver.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
probablyrobots 15y ago
ianaee, but the board from the led bulb looks just as hand soldered as the board from the cfl. I don't think the following argument holds up very well. "I was quite impressed by the use of connectors in this bulb rather than relying on low-cost-labor for hand-soldering which has been used in the manufacturing of CFLs."
- bryanlarsen 15y ago
  Daniel_Newby provides an alternative explanation: that it's wave soldered. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2860140 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2860140
- weeny 15y ago
  The Rebel LEDs can't be hand soldered or wave soldered. They are reflow soldered. You can do this with a toaster oven.
jim_h 15y ago
The LED technology used in that bulb seems a little dated. I believe it's using Phillips' Luxeon Rebel LEDs. Looking at the pictures, there's 3 sections and each section has 6 Rebel LEDs. Total of 18 LEDs. All for output of 800 lumens. A recent LED flashlight can produce 800 lumens with just 1 (CREE XM-L) LED. For example, http://www.fenixlight.com/viewproduct.asp?id=141 http://www.fenixlight.com/viewproduct.asp?id=141 If you want a warmer white tint, it's a little less lumens, but you can always use 2 LEDs.. LEDs have come a long way in the last couple of years. It's just unfortunate that light bulb manufacturers do not make and sell new models as quickly as flashlight companies. There seems to be a new model every week with the latest LED for crazy light output. Another example, http://www.fenixlight.com/viewproduct.asp?id=149 http://www.fenixlight.com/viewproduct.asp?id=149 It does over 2,000 lumens with 3 LEDs!! This is just one company. There are many more that also have crazy flashlights. If you want to learn more about LEDs or flashlights, head over to http://www.candlepowerforums.com/vb/forum.php http://www.candlepowerforums.com/vb/forum.php
- ars 15y ago
  The reason they are so bright is they don't need to worry about color accuracy. I bet these bulbs are very blue. Also, their efficiency is about 57.8 lm/w which isn't very good (it's not terrible - but once you try to get a good color the efficiency drops a lot). http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=800+lumens+%2F+%288*2500mAh+*+1.5+volt+%2F+%282+hours+%2B+10+minutes%29%29+in+lm+%2F+w http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=800+lumens+%2F+%288*250...
  - weeny 15y ago
    They aren't blue at all, they are 2700K - and this is a big part of the reason they are 57.8 lm/w. The remote phosphor, while creating a very uniform photometric distribution, reduces the overall light output by filtering the very monochromatic blue light into warm white light.
- mixmastamyk 15y ago
  From the article it appeared that the selling point of the bulb was omnidirectional light at a certain power. In that case a large number of weak leds makes sense.
euroclydon 15y ago
Anyone know what this comment means: Incandescent technology is still superior to any other lighting tech, especially solid state. When one factors in laser sintering of incandescent filaments that increases their efficacy to 3-5 times even LED's, incandescents absolutely rule when considering their performance and cost of production/recycling/logistics/..ect... I love bandgap technology, but it will be hard pressed to beat Edison's brilliance (it hasn't been done yet, despite articles such as this one).
- nate_meurer 15y ago
  It means nothing. LED lighting is still an infant technology. Any shortcomings are a moving target given how fast the technology is progressing. The reference to filament sintering is incorrect. First, it's not sintering, it's a process applied to a filament after is has been drawn. Second, the efficiency gain is around double, which still can't even come close to LEDs. Look here for a bit more: http://www.rochester.edu/news/show.php?id=3385 http://www.rochester.edu/news/show.php?id=3385 The reference to "production/recycling/logistics" is also wrong if it refers to the EROI of LED lighting, which has already bettered that of incandescent lighting: http://www.osram-os.com/life-cycle-assessment http://www.osram-os.com/life-cycle-assessment
ck2 15y ago
As previously seen on HN http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2845306 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2845306 Note this is a $40 bulb. And it doesn't come with a 20 year warranty, the circuit could fail in a few years and then you've got one expensive lump.
- angusgr 15y ago
  This. In particular, I'm concerned by the little switchmode power supply on a non-user-servicable board potted into the depths of the bulb. If that 5c capacitor dies, a $40 bulb gets scrapped even if everything else is still good. Hopefully Phillips have designed around that, but 20 years is a long time and they have little incentive to do so. I suppose a proper, universal, standard for low-voltage DC in houses (ala 12v Halogen downlighting only universal, something like PoE) is probably too much to hope for.
Cushman 15y ago
I wonder what the actual color temperature of the "blue" LEDs is— I've been hoping for a while that the rise of LED lamps would finally mean shifting to more natural colors. It's kind of absurd to me that in this day and age we're still trying to make our artificial light look like another kind of artificial light rather than sunlight. (For reference, daytime sunlight is around 5500k— these bulbs are marketed as 2700k, which is about the color of sunset, sunrise, or a large fire.)
- ars 15y ago
  That's because we like the color of fire and always have. The lux from the sun is so high that the color temperature doesn't matter except in photos.
  - Cushman 15y ago
    Always have... since the invention of controllable fire by nearly anatomically modern humans? I'm skeptical. For the entire history of human evolution since the formation of the Earth, that color of light has meant it's almost, or just was, night, and was strictly transient. Just 400,000 years ago it also started meaning that it is night. And just in the last couple of hundred years, with industrialization, it's become the color that most of us see most of the time. Now, I'm not saying that's necessarily bad— but you gotta wonder why.
    - onemoreact 15y ago
      My understanding was controllable fire predated anatomically modern humans. I remember one theory that basically said using fire allowed modern humans to evolve with a larger brain because fire aided digestion. PS: Seems to be up in the air: Claims for the earliest definitive evidence of control of fire by a member of Homo range from 0.2 to 1.7 million years ago (Mya).[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_of_fire_by_early_humans http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_of_fire_by_early_humans Note: Homo erectus is fiarly diffrent from Homo sapiens. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_erectus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_erectus
juiceandjuice 15y ago
Does anyone know where you can get the phosphor plastic they use in these?
- weeny 15y ago
  It is a plastic resin that has been blended to a precise dosage with YAG phosphor. You can buy YAG phosphor easily from wholesalers, for example, phosphortech, a Georgia company, sells a variety of colors of phosphor. However, the trick is to precisely and uniformly blend it in with the plastic resin - the reason that it takes so much time and development money to make a light bulb like this.
  - juiceandjuice 15y ago
    Nice, who do you work for?
dhughes 15y ago
Another thing to consider is other than LED being so much more complex compared to a glass bulb with a tungsten wire in a vacuum is why a bulb? We have been limited to bulbs why not lighting in sheet form or around the edges of rooms rather than a point source in the middle of the ceiling? I know manufactures have to be backwards compatible but in the future it would be nice to have the option of a different method to light an area.

116 points by powertower 15y ago

I would love to see something like this on the new Switch bulb coming out (supposedly) this fall. More info on the Switch bulb: http://www.slate.com/id/2298444/pagenum/all http://www.slate.com/id/2298444/pagenum/all

ErikRogneby 15y ago

Hell of a lot of components for a light bulb. The joys of achieving feature parity with the (150+ year old) incumbent product/technology.

owenmarshall 15y ago
I'd be interested in seeing what lightbulbs looked like if we designed them from scratch today -- without, as you note, 150+ years of expectations and needs. What could they do that the traditional old incandescent can't? What would they look like? On a more general note, does this "design in a vacuum" have any valid applications? Can this lead to ideas that we can use today, or is it just pie in the sky thinking?
- ristretto 15y ago
  Well the bulb shape is really a relic from the past. The design has already been disrupted with fluorescent lights, that brought bigger cylindrical shapes that diffuse more.
- ErikRogneby 15y ago
  It might look like this: http://www.adafruit.com/products/357 http://www.adafruit.com/products/357 - Buy your lighting by the foot. 12V DC may make more sense for homes these days than 115 AC. The incandescent bulb was the "killer app" for a whole power ecosystem. In older houses in places like San Francisco you sometimes find wiring going through the old gas lamp lines.
  - dmm 15y ago
    > 12V DC may make more sense for homes these days than 115 AC Have you ever sized any 12v wiring? To carry a load of 22amps 20 feet with a voltage drop of <2% with a 12V system requires 4awg wire. That's crazy big and gets very expensive. 22amps might sound like a lot and lighting may be getting more efficient, but you'll still want to run things like vacuum cleaners.
    - kragen 15y ago
      > To carry a load of 22amps 20 feet with a voltage drop of <2% with a 12V system requires 4awg wire. The wire size needed to carry a load of a specific number of amps does not vary with the voltage between that wire and some other wire somewhere. Perhaps you mean, "To carry a load equivalent to 22 amps on 120 volts, a 12-volt system needs to carry 220 amps, which requires 4AWG wire to lose less than 2% over 20 feet."
      - dmm 15y ago
        > does not vary with the voltage between that wire and some other wire somewhere. I'm not following what you're saying here. I was just pointing out that voltage drop can be a significant concern with low voltage systems and controlling that can require thick wires. From my rough calculations, voltage drop at 12V over 20' of 4awg copper @ 20A is ~1.7% and @ 100A is ~8.6%.
        kragen 15y ago
        Yes, you're right. I was wrong. Thanks for explaining. My calculations are below. Hopefully you have enlightened me; please let me know if I'm still confused. 4awg wire is ¼Ω per thousand feet (6dB of resistance below 10AWG), or 0.005Ω for 20 feet. 20 amps × 0.005Ω = 0.1 volts. So the voltage drop is 0.1 volts, which is 0.8% of 12V or 0.08% of 120V. If it's 20 feet each way, it's 1.7% or 0.17%. The low-voltage gets you double: you need more amps to carry the same power (which is what I thought you were saying) and you also need thicker wire to carry the same current. So, to take a worst-case example, if you have a 900W microwave oven that can tolerate a power supply 10% lower than nominal, and you're running it on 120V 20 feet from the breaker box, you can deal with 6 volts of drop on each side of the romex, at which point you need 900/(120×.9) = 8⅓A. 6V/8⅓A = 0.72Ω, which means your wire can have up to 36Ω per thousand feet, which would be 25AWG, which is about half a millimeter across and commonly used for Ethernet. Not safe, because you're dissipating more than a watt per foot, which might set something on fire, but the microwave will still run. (For safety you'd probably use 12AWG instead, which is 2mm across, if not 10AWG.) If instead you're running a different 900W microwave off 12V, you need 900W/(12V×0.9), which is 83 amps. But you can't afford more than 0.6V drop on either side of the rails, and 0.6V/83A = 7.2mΩ, so you can't afford more than 0.36Ω per thousand feet, which is 5AWG, which is a copper bar 4.6mm in diameter, thicker than any wire in a normal person's house. Again, that's not to be safe — that's to get the microwave to work at all. You're still dissipating over a watt per foot of cable. To be safe, you need 2AWG, which is 6.5mm in diameter, and a pain in the ass to bend if you don't get stranded wire. 20 feet of copper 2AWG triple-stranded wire costs US$150, which is more than the microwave, and weighs 15 pounds.
- Alex3917 15y ago
  "I'd be interested in seeing what lightbulbs looked like if we designed them from scratch today" The problem is that humans have coevolved with both sunlight and fire. While the shape of the lightbulb may be arbitrary, I think the fact that they provide uneven lighting and cast all sorts of shadows is probably necessary for good mental health. (Because it provides more sensory stimulation, and more closely mimics the natural environment as compared with what you would get from evenly distributing LEDs across the ceiling.)
  - stretchwithme 15y ago
    sort of like what you hear in an anechoic chamber sounds pretty unnatural with all of the normally reflected sound being absorbed.
- bryanlarsen 15y ago
  Perhaps even more interesting would be "what would they look like if unconstrained by technology"? A lot of science fiction proposes the uniformly glowing ceiling. This would provide a very consistent & uniform light without the eye strain caused when you look directly at a point source. Another common idiom in science fiction is to replace your windows with giant transparent television sets, functioning simultaneously as window, television, telephone, artwork and light bulb.
  - Joeri 15y ago
    Transparent OLED has the potential to produce glowing wall panels, and transparent screens. http://www.ledsmagazine.com/news/6/10/19 http://www.ledsmagazine.com/news/6/10/19 http://www.geeky-gadgets.com/samsung-transparent-oled-display-notebook-07-01-2010/ http://www.geeky-gadgets.com/samsung-transparent-oled-displa...
  - juiceandjuice 15y ago
    With this phosphor plastic you could make some really rad rail lighting. Imagine two long strips with the phosphor on your ceiling in your room.
- ChuckMcM 15y ago
  Lots of good suggestions here. GE has 'light panels' [1] and one of the things which I am sure we'll see for 'installed' lighting will be 'sky ceilings' that would be a ceiling covered with OLED panels arranged seamlessly which mimic the 'sky' when you are outdoors, providing night views with stars, twilight colors, etc. Probably won't be the 'common' implementation however. Generally I think one thing that will survive will be 115V ac power distribution. Its got a lot going for it in terms of installed base and understanding its transmission properties. The means LED based lighting will always have some circuitry to rectify and regulate that voltage. Of course they may evolve so it rectifies it to 135v dc and then runs off that. I enjoyed the psychology comment as well. There were some comments that gas didn't give that 'homey hearth fire' smell when burned back when people were switching from wood fireplaces over to gas. Even without constraint, I think you will find lighting fixtures don't change too much. You've got area lights and directional lights. The designers will have fun with them, glowing coils, maybe pillows that glow. But a good reading light puts out a uniform beam of light that can be directed easily to your lap. A good area light provides a widely dispersed light without being impossible to look at. Those constraints won't change because the technology has. [1] http://www.ge.com/products_services/lighting.html http://www.ge.com/products_services/lighting.html
cjdavis 15y ago
Meanwhile the >75% reduction in power usage and >800% increase in lifetime are features that have surpassed the incumbent (which are what makes the $40 cost affordable - a feature they are no where near approaching..)
jonknee 15y ago
Parity? It uses less energy, exhausts less head and lasts orders of magnitude longer.
- marshray 15y ago
  But even parity was not achieved by CFLs, particularly for dimmable applications. It seems like the latest generation achieving parity (where the CFLs failed to) with the century-old technology is the notable point, more so than by how much they surpassed it. If that makes any sense.
  - ars 15y ago
    You can use CCFL's instead. They are fully dimmable, instant on (no warmup period), and last 25,000 hours.
    - nitrogen 15y ago
      I've done some searching for CCFLs and it seems very few people are making and selling them, and they only carry 2700K warm white. Can you recommend a good place to buy high-lumen CCFLs that have a more neutral temperature?
- ErikRogneby 15y ago
  Required parity features: bulb form factor, warm white light, dimmable, runs off 115V AC source, screws in to existing sockets. Feature enhancement: long life.
  - colanderman 15y ago
    Ummmmmmmmmmmmmm.... I'm pretty sure incandescent bulbs, being a pioneering technology, got to dictate four of those requirements (bulb form factor, triac-based dimmer circuits, 115 V AC, socket form). The final one, "warm white light", is not a feature incandescent bulbs had 150 years ago.
  - jan_g 15y ago
digikata 15y ago
For all the complexity, it's a lot more efficient. Some of the complexity problem comes from adapting LED to design decisions made for incandescent AC lighting in the switches, dimmers, sockets, and power supply. If it were worth it for the user to rewire their house, they could likely get overall simpler and more reliable LED lighting. There's a parallel to software design, one often incurs complexity when optimizing or adapting one software approach to another. The system might be more reliable overall if you can re-align the entire design, but there's a cost involved in it that might not make it worth it (particularly for physical things with replication costs).
pilgrim689 15y ago
Here's another feature an LED light bulb offers: high-bandwidth data transfer. http://www.ted.com/talks/harald_haas_wireless_data_from_every_light_bulb.html http://www.ted.com/talks/harald_haas_wireless_data_from_ever...

maukdaddy 15y ago

Does the use of connectors imply that users could replace failed LED boards instead of trashing the entire bulb? Or even upgrading to more efficient LED boards?

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
sixtofour 15y ago
I'm sure it's no usable serviceable parts. The article's author had to destroy the bulb to get in and take pictures.
ChuckMcM 15y ago
It means its possible, it doesn't mean that the owner could do it. It would be good PR on phillip's part to include a postage paid mailing label that would let you recycle dead bulbs. They could recover most of it and save both e-waste and the energy cost of casting a new heatsink.
- ars 15y ago
  The energy cost of individually mailing a heavy bulb is greater than the energy cost of casting a heatsink. Centralized recycling might work, but not a postage paid mailer. Plus who is going to successfully store a mailer for 10 years while waiting for the bulb to burn out. And in 10 years they won't want this bulb back, there won't be anything reusable in it. Just recycle it for the metal.
  - gregable 15y ago
    Storing the mailer isn't a big problem. When I buy a new bulb, I'll get a new mailer. I toss the first round. I don't disagree with you on the energy cost though.
nate_meurer 15y ago
This is a brilliant idea. Absolutely brilliant. My biggest reservation about buying LEDs now isn't the price; it's that the lights that will be available next year will be twice as good, and I can't stand the thought of discarding an entire bulb in order to upgrade. It makes no sense to me that the actual LED is inseparable from its quarter-pound aluminium and plastic shroud. A lightbulb should allow you to swap out some small component that includes the LED die and perhaps the driver.

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probablyrobots 15y ago

ianaee, but the board from the led bulb looks just as hand soldered as the board from the cfl. I don't think the following argument holds up very well. "I was quite impressed by the use of connectors in this bulb rather than relying on low-cost-labor for hand-soldering which has been used in the manufacturing of CFLs."

bryanlarsen 15y ago
Daniel_Newby provides an alternative explanation: that it's wave soldered. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2860140 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2860140
weeny 15y ago
The Rebel LEDs can't be hand soldered or wave soldered. They are reflow soldered. You can do this with a toaster oven.

jim_h 15y ago

The LED technology used in that bulb seems a little dated. I believe it's using Phillips' Luxeon Rebel LEDs. Looking at the pictures, there's 3 sections and each section has 6 Rebel LEDs. Total of 18 LEDs. All for output of 800 lumens. A recent LED flashlight can produce 800 lumens with just 1 (CREE XM-L) LED. For example, http://www.fenixlight.com/viewproduct.asp?id=141 http://www.fenixlight.com/viewproduct.asp?id=141 If you want a warmer white tint, it's a little less lumens, but you can always use 2 LEDs.. LEDs have come a long way in the last couple of years. It's just unfortunate that light bulb manufacturers do not make and sell new models as quickly as flashlight companies. There seems to be a new model every week with the latest LED for crazy light output. Another example, http://www.fenixlight.com/viewproduct.asp?id=149 http://www.fenixlight.com/viewproduct.asp?id=149 It does over 2,000 lumens with 3 LEDs!! This is just one company. There are many more that also have crazy flashlights. If you want to learn more about LEDs or flashlights, head over to http://www.candlepowerforums.com/vb/forum.php http://www.candlepowerforums.com/vb/forum.php

ars 15y ago
The reason they are so bright is they don't need to worry about color accuracy. I bet these bulbs are very blue. Also, their efficiency is about 57.8 lm/w which isn't very good (it's not terrible - but once you try to get a good color the efficiency drops a lot). http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=800+lumens+%2F+%288*2500mAh+*+1.5+volt+%2F+%282+hours+%2B+10+minutes%29%29+in+lm+%2F+w http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=800+lumens+%2F+%288*250...
- weeny 15y ago
  They aren't blue at all, they are 2700K - and this is a big part of the reason they are 57.8 lm/w. The remote phosphor, while creating a very uniform photometric distribution, reduces the overall light output by filtering the very monochromatic blue light into warm white light.
mixmastamyk 15y ago
From the article it appeared that the selling point of the bulb was omnidirectional light at a certain power. In that case a large number of weak leds makes sense.

euroclydon 15y ago

Anyone know what this comment means: Incandescent technology is still superior to any other lighting tech, especially solid state. When one factors in laser sintering of incandescent filaments that increases their efficacy to 3-5 times even LED's, incandescents absolutely rule when considering their performance and cost of production/recycling/logistics/..ect... I love bandgap technology, but it will be hard pressed to beat Edison's brilliance (it hasn't been done yet, despite articles such as this one).

nate_meurer 15y ago
It means nothing. LED lighting is still an infant technology. Any shortcomings are a moving target given how fast the technology is progressing. The reference to filament sintering is incorrect. First, it's not sintering, it's a process applied to a filament after is has been drawn. Second, the efficiency gain is around double, which still can't even come close to LEDs. Look here for a bit more: http://www.rochester.edu/news/show.php?id=3385 http://www.rochester.edu/news/show.php?id=3385 The reference to "production/recycling/logistics" is also wrong if it refers to the EROI of LED lighting, which has already bettered that of incandescent lighting: http://www.osram-os.com/life-cycle-assessment http://www.osram-os.com/life-cycle-assessment

ck2 15y ago

As previously seen on HN http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2845306 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2845306 Note this is a $40 bulb. And it doesn't come with a 20 year warranty, the circuit could fail in a few years and then you've got one expensive lump.

angusgr 15y ago
This. In particular, I'm concerned by the little switchmode power supply on a non-user-servicable board potted into the depths of the bulb. If that 5c capacitor dies, a $40 bulb gets scrapped even if everything else is still good. Hopefully Phillips have designed around that, but 20 years is a long time and they have little incentive to do so. I suppose a proper, universal, standard for low-voltage DC in houses (ala 12v Halogen downlighting only universal, something like PoE) is probably too much to hope for.

Cushman 15y ago

I wonder what the actual color temperature of the "blue" LEDs is— I've been hoping for a while that the rise of LED lamps would finally mean shifting to more natural colors. It's kind of absurd to me that in this day and age we're still trying to make our artificial light look like another kind of artificial light rather than sunlight. (For reference, daytime sunlight is around 5500k— these bulbs are marketed as 2700k, which is about the color of sunset, sunrise, or a large fire.)

ars 15y ago
That's because we like the color of fire and always have. The lux from the sun is so high that the color temperature doesn't matter except in photos.
- Cushman 15y ago
  Always have... since the invention of controllable fire by nearly anatomically modern humans? I'm skeptical. For the entire history of human evolution since the formation of the Earth, that color of light has meant it's almost, or just was, night, and was strictly transient. Just 400,000 years ago it also started meaning that it is night. And just in the last couple of hundred years, with industrialization, it's become the color that most of us see most of the time. Now, I'm not saying that's necessarily bad— but you gotta wonder why.
  - onemoreact 15y ago
    My understanding was controllable fire predated anatomically modern humans. I remember one theory that basically said using fire allowed modern humans to evolve with a larger brain because fire aided digestion. PS: Seems to be up in the air: Claims for the earliest definitive evidence of control of fire by a member of Homo range from 0.2 to 1.7 million years ago (Mya).[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_of_fire_by_early_humans http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_of_fire_by_early_humans Note: Homo erectus is fiarly diffrent from Homo sapiens. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_erectus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_erectus

juiceandjuice 15y ago

Does anyone know where you can get the phosphor plastic they use in these?

weeny 15y ago
It is a plastic resin that has been blended to a precise dosage with YAG phosphor. You can buy YAG phosphor easily from wholesalers, for example, phosphortech, a Georgia company, sells a variety of colors of phosphor. However, the trick is to precisely and uniformly blend it in with the plastic resin - the reason that it takes so much time and development money to make a light bulb like this.
- juiceandjuice 15y ago
  Nice, who do you work for?

dhughes 15y ago

Another thing to consider is other than LED being so much more complex compared to a glass bulb with a tungsten wire in a vacuum is why a bulb? We have been limited to bulbs why not lighting in sheet form or around the edges of rooms rather than a point source in the middle of the ceiling? I know manufactures have to be backwards compatible but in the future it would be nice to have the option of a different method to light an area.