The Many Advantages Of LED Lights

LED lamps use diodes to emit light rather than the gas or filament that the older bulbs use. The way they are constructed is usually by a cluster or several LEDs housed in a suitable container. These containers come in many sizes, shapes and types of cap so as to fit into the desired socket.

LEDs first became available in the 1960s and by the 1970s were being used in a wide range of equipment, however, these early LEDs only had a very low output and were useless for general lighting but were used widely as types of indicator.

To start with they came only in colours (blue, yellow, green, red & orange.) It was only in 1993 that the first white LED light was made by combining the lights that were the colour of the spectrum.

LEDs have much longer lifetimes and run on very low wattages, these advantages translate to substantial savings on energy and labour replacement costs. The fact that there is no filament or tube to break makes them a far more durable replacement.

Other advantages are that unlike fluorescent lamps, LEDs are fully dimmable and also do not contain any hazardous mercury or halogen gases.

However, currently there are some disadvantages. The way in which white LEDs are manufactured is not yet mature enough for them to be made at a low enough price for mass production and general use. There are several production barriers that need to be overcome first and several processes that need to be improved, like depositing the active semiconductor layers. If this process can be improved it would vastly increase the overall output of LED manufacturing.

Another drawback to LEDs that would be more noticeable by the user is the colour rendering index or CRI of LEDs. CRI is a measurement of how clean and white a light source is when compared with sunlight (which obviously has the top CRI of 100.) As it stands most affordable LEDs will have a CRI of around 70, which is far too low to provide quality indoor light. There are LEDs available with higher CRI but they aren’t available for the sort of price that everyone in the country will want to pay for light bulbs, so they are most likely not going to replace traditional bulbs just yet.