Philips switches on bright LED bulb

Philips is introducing an LED bulb that gives off as much light as a 75-watt incandescent bulb and consume 17 watts of power.

The lighting giant said today that the EnduraLED A21 will be available in the fourth quarter for a price expected to be between $40 and $45. It will show off the bulb tomorrow at the LightFair lighting conference, where many LED lighting announcements are expected.

The EnduraLED A21 will be the first general-purpose LED bulb to give off as much light as a 75-watt incandescent bulb, according to Philips. It will be rated at 1,100 lumens and an efficiency of almost 65 lumens per watt.

The bulb itself roughly resembles a crown, a design meant to give off light evenly. LED light sources give off directional light, making them very good at downlights or spotlights, but now manufacturers are designing bulbs to disperse light more in all directions.

The bulb will have a rated life of 25,000 hours, or about 17 years with four hours of daily use. The color rendering index, a measure of light quality, is 80 and the color temperature is 2,700, or a warmer yellow light meant to be similar to incandescents.

Philips last year started selling a 60-watt equivalent LED bulb with the same design and LED light sources, which is available through Home Depot for $39.97. It uses 12.5 watts.

Lighting manufacturers are seeking to boost the brightness and light quality of LEDs to make them attractive alternatives to incandescent and compact fluorescent bulbs. The prices for LED bulbs are much higher but are expected to drop over time.

Philips said that over its lifetime, an EnduraLED A21 could save a home or business $160. There are about 90 million 75-watt incandescent bulbs sold every year in the U.S., and switching to LEDs would eliminate the carbon emissions of almost 1 million cars, according to Philips.

Philips enters new decade of sustainably lighting Times Square Ball

New York, USA – In 2010-2011, Royal Philips Electronics (NYSE: PHG, AEX: PHI) enters a new decade of energy efficiency, celebrating its 11th anniversary as the official Lighting Partner to the world-famous Times Square Ball, a beacon of LED innovation. Both the Times Square Alliance and Philips share a commitment to sustainability, reflected in the Ball’s ongoing upgrades with Philips energy-efficient lighting products, culminating in the recent upgrade to LED lighting, which have reduced its energy usage by 88 percent over the halogen technology it replaced.

Originally lighting the Ball with specially designed halogen “Millennium” bulbs to mark the century passage from 1999 to 2000, Philips converted the Times Square Ball to all Philips LUXEON® LEDs (light emitting diodes) in 2007-2008 to mark the Ball’s milestone 100th anniversary. The Ball was upgraded to higher-power, more energy-efficient LUXEON LEDs yet again in 2008-2009 when the ball was doubled in size. Today’s Ball is lit all year round and uses just 12 percent of the energy that would have been required to light it with the original technology.

The Ball benefits from Philips’ unmatched investment in LED technology, with its modules lasting about 30,000 hours and using just 22 watts of electricity. If the Ball were still lit with Halogen lamps, it would use 1.1 million KWh, whereas the new LED Ball uses just 140,000. In addition, these LED modules will last years, compared with months for the halogens which they replace, drastically reducing the amount of maintenance and re-lamping required by the Ball. This same LED technology is available to consumers through Philips’ AmbientLED line, which includes such innovations as the world’s first 60 watt LED equivalent lamp, the Philips AmbientLED 12 watt.

At a Glance: Times Square Ball Lighting Facts

* As a result of being lit by Philips LEDs,
- The Ball will consume only the same amount of energy per hour as it takes to operate just two traditional home ovens. (Source: U.S. Department of Energy – Consumer Appliance Energy Use)
- The numerals will consume the same amount of energy per hour as it takes to operate just one 40 gallon home water heater. (Source: U.S. Department of Energy – Consumer Appliance Energy Use)
* The Ball is lit by 32,256 Philips LUXEON® LEDs, each of which can be digitally controlled to create extraordinary effects.
* Red, green, blue and white LEDs in the Ball create a palette of more than 16 million vivid, vibrant, and highly-saturated colors as well as billions of possible lighting effects.
* The LED lighting in the Ball has a rated average life of 30,000 hours, compared to the roughly 1,000 hour life span of previous incandescent and halogen solutions. This is especially important as the Ball is now lit year-round.
* The light source in the Ball is 88% more energy efficient than in previous years, requiring only 22 watts of power for Philips’ red, green, blue, and white LUXEON LEDs to produce the same amount of light output as it took 180 watts of incandescent light bulbs to produce in previous years. This represents a 158-watt (or 88%) reduction in electricity consumption per four-color series.
* The Ball features waterproof modules and connections as well as the ability to passively dissipate heat. Each LED in the ball has its own specific address, enabling a level of two-way communication and digital controllability never before possible.
* LEDs demand far less electricity than incandescent or halogen technology by delivering an equivalent level of light output with significantly fewer watts of power. This reduces the amount of electricity that utilities will have to generate, which helps avoid the airborne emission of such hazardous pollutants as CO2, mercury and sulfur dioxide – all by-products of the electricity generation process.
* Whereas incandescent and halogen bulbs may be subject to failure if dropped or bounced, LEDs can withstand vibration and shock, delivering superior durability.
* Philips LEDs are lead and mercury-free as well as RoHS-compliant (a European standard known as “reduction of hazardous substances”).

+ Backgrounder “Times Square New Year’s Eve Ball”

About Royal Philips Electronics

Royal Philips Electronics of the Netherlands (NYSE: PHG, AEX: PHI) is a diversified health and well-being company, focused on improving people’s lives through timely innovations. As a world leader in healthcare, lifestyle and lighting, Philips integrates technologies and design into people-centric solutions, based on fundamental customer insights and the brand promise of “sense and simplicity”. Headquartered in the Netherlands, Philips employs more than 118,000 employees in more than 60 countries worldwide. With sales of EUR 23 billion in 2009, the company is a market leader in cardiac care, acute care and home healthcare, energy efficient lighting solutions and new lighting applications, as well as lifestyle products for personal well-being and pleasure with strong leadership positions in flat TV, male shaving and grooming, portable entertainment and oral healthcare.

Philips Offers its $10 million LED bulb

Recently, Philips stands as the lonely first in the would-be line of contenders vying for the $10 million prize slated by the US government for offering an energy efficient alternative to the 60 Watt light bulb.

The idea of an XL prize money on developing a light bulb may seem absurd but the amount of energy it would help save, which comes to 34 Terawatt-hours of power nationwide per year, does validate the huge offering. The entries were supposed to deliver at least 900 Lumens output, with a consumption of less than 10 watts, and a lifespan of at least 25,000 hours.

Energy saving is good, we hope they also keep the cost economics of the 21st century lighting substitute in mind.

Comparing Xenon Lights and LED Light

An updated study has been published by Limited, developer of thin-form supercapacitors that compare flash solutions for camera phones — xenon, standard LEDs powered by a battery, and high-current LEDs powered by a supercapacitor using the company’s BriteFlash(TM) power architecture. The study tested each solution’s ability to deliver the light energy needed to take digital-still-camera-quality pictures in low-light conditions, and also compared shutter requirements, ease of design-in, safety and size.

The original report from October 2006 compared light power and energy using 1.3 to 3.2-megapixel camera phones. The new report includes data from 5-megapixel camera phones released in the last year, and also considers advancements in camera sensors, xenon flash units, high-power white LEDs (WLEDS) and LED flash drivers.

Tests again showed that the LED BriteFlash approach delivers more light energy than most xenon flashes in a thin form factor suitable for slim camera phones and digital cameras.

Clear pictures in dim environments require sufficient light energy — the total amount of light received by each pixel in the camera sensor — during image-capture time. “People often wrongly assume that light power, which is the brightness or intensity of the flash, is the key because it’s what draws our attention, but it’s really the light energy that counts,” said Pierre Mars, CAP-XX vice president of applications engineering.

To calculate light energy, one would multiply light power (in lux) by the duration of the flash exposure (in seconds): Light power (lux) x flash exposure time (sec) = light energy (lux.sec). Ten to fifteen lux.sec of light energy is ideal for high-resolution pictures:

–  Xenon flash tubes driven by electrolytic storage capacitors deliver
higher light power, but over a very short flash exposure.
–  High-current LEDs driven by a supercapacitor deliver lower light
power, but over a longer flash exposure to generate more light energy.

Flash solutions tested:

–  Xenon: SonyEricsson K800, LG KU990, Nokia N82 and Samsung G800, all
with 5-megapixel cameras but with varying size electrolytic storage
capacitors.
–  Standard battery-powered LEDs: Nokia N73 (3.2-megapixel) and N96 (5-
megapixel)
–  Supercapacitor-powered LEDs: To demonstrate the BriteFlash approach,
CAP-XX used a small, thin (20mm x 18mm x 3.8mm thick), dual-cell
supercapacitor to drive a two-LED array of Philips LUXEON® PWM4s at 2A
each or 4A total during the flash pulse.

Philips Find Ways to Closes Yellow LED Gap

The yellow light-emitting diode (LED) gap always trouble Philips till now. Recently, researchers with Philips Lumileds (San Jose, CA) have developed a monochromatic nitride diode to closes the gap. The phosphor-converted (PC) amber LED demonstrated by Regina Mueller-Mach and her colleagues uses the down-conversion of blue light from an indium-gallium-nitride (InGaN) LED to longer-wavelength light by a phosphor, in a variation of a well-established process for producing cold or warm white light from blue LED light (see also “Fluorescent microspheres create white-light LEDs”).

Monochromatic light-emitting diodes cover a large part of the visible spectrum with high efficiency. For blue light, nitride diodes achieve external quantum efficiencies in excess of 65%. For red light, phosphor diodes achieve efficiencies of approximately 50%. However, so far no highly efficient monochromatic LEDs have been available for the “yellow gap” at around 560 nm.

Leveraging previous research on warm white light, the researchers succeeded in down-converting blue LED light into monochromatic amber light with a 595 nm wavelength and a color purity of 98.7%. The external quantum efficiency of the PC amber LED is at 30-40%, depending on temperature. Compared to direct amber LEDs, the new PC amber LED is two to five times as bright. It achieves a light output of 70 lumens at a 350 mA current.

There are numerous applications for the LUXEON Rebel PC Amber LED. It can be used in yellow traffic lights or signals as well as in cars’ turn signals or warning lights for construction sites. They could also be used in consumer electronics and their high efficiency makes them inexpensive.