Many who grew up beneath a warm, inefficient incandescent or halogen glow are having a hard time coming to grips with the stale, stiff, efficient illumination provided by
CFL or
LED bulbs. Two companies, Nexxus Lighting and QD Vision, have paired up to change that, with the former providing an 8 watt (75 watt equivalent) LED bulb, and the latter providing a thin film of
quantum dots that can precisely control its color. The dots are microscopic particles that filter light into different colors depending on their size, from red to blue as the dots get smaller -- some only 10 atoms in diameter. The first bulbs are due later this year, and while no word on price is given, Nexxus's current LED bulb costs $100 on its own and surely that layer of dots won't come cheap. Also, no word on whether you'll need to use a Handlink to turn the thing on and off.
[Via
Physorg]
posted May 6th 2009 7:21AM
Trouble is, sometimes these light bulbs awake to find themselves trapped in the past...
facing quantum dots that were not their own and driven by an unknown force to change lighting for the better.
Too much time on your hands boys.
Why did that picture make me think of a naked Wolverine?
The same reason pictures of Wolverine make me think of naked Scott Bakula.
??? That pic is from some old @ss time travel show from the 80's-90's. I saw it on iTunes the other day. The actor cross dresses a lot, but if you're into that... :P
Early 90's != old @ss
I also thought it was Wolverine.
I have some LED track lighting in my media room, and it does have a "cold" blueish color. That's okay, though, because I expected it to be such. The CFL lighting throughout the rest of the house has the yellowish color similar to the older incandescent lighting.
I think it's because they started putting more phosphorus in the lights to cause more of the yellowish color. But I happen to like the color of CFLs more than the old bulbs. It seems to have a "cleaner" brightness to them, and not as murky as incandescent bulbs.
"The dots are microscopic particles that filter light into different colors depending on their size"
Really? I've read that quantum dots are in fact hockey-rink shaped holes. when you dump electrons into them they behave like pseudo atoms. Put 1 electron into a quantum dot and it behaves a lot like hydrogen. Put 6e- in there and it's a pseudo carbon atom.
I would guess that these lights have arrays of a variety of sized holes, and when the array is charged, some holes act like elements that reflect or emit redder or bluer spectrums of light. Think of the different colours that different metals give off when they are burned. The combined effect of these would be a nice wide spectrum light source.
Anyone know for sure?
I didn't think you could put a variable number of electrons into a given hole.
But your second paragraph sounds more like what I recall. The hole absorbs energy until it reaches a certain energy level, then it gives off a photon, the energy level of the photon (color of the light) is determined by the size of the dot. After giving off a photon the process repeats. So yeah, you'd want multiple sizes of dots (you probably can't even avoid it, I doubt the manufacturing process is that well controlled) so that you get multiple wavelengths of light and thus some form of white.
Basically, it works like a phosphor.
god I love the Quantum Leap reference in the pic and at the end. :) ... takes me back
Same here buddy. I feel bad for all these people who don't get the reference.
Omg, an Archon!
Halogen! Lucky bastard.
When I was young, we had incandescent, and WE LIKED IT.
When I was young we had candles and we liked it.
... said my grandma
+1 one for that....i lol'd
"Dr. Sam Beckett stepped into the Quantum Leap accelerator"...
"...and vanished"
Ziggy would be proud.
Yeah that's what Al's 2nd ex-wife, or maybe 3rd... NO 5th ex-wife said...
About time. I hate the look of fluorescent lights, and most LEDs I've seen aren't warm enough to be friendly to the eyes. The proposed ban on incandescents is ridiculous, and I'm going to buy as many as I can before they stop making them. However I would like to see what these look like.
2700K CFL bulbs have been on the market for a while now. They have the same color temperature as an incandescent, so there's no reason to hate on them anymore. They save you money. The only reason to buy incandescent at this point is for dimmable light fixtures. Dimmable CFLs are prohibitively expensive.
They have the same color temperature, but not the same quality of color. I guess a lot of people aren't sensitive to it, but I certainly am. To me, fluorescents make everything look flat and colorless compared to an incandescent, and especially halogens. If you look at a graph of the color spectrum emissions, fluorescents have huge spikes at certain frequencies while the rest of it is pretty weak. However, incandescent bulbs have a smooth curve the entire way through, being weighted towards the red, similar to the sun. Maybe once they figure that out, I'll buy another bulb.
Sounds like your brain got swiss-cheesed....
Most of us that grew up under the warm glow of incandescent or halogen bulbs learned that they were "warm" the hard way.
When using Leds at work, I felt my eyes not getting too strained..We have used CFLs for a quite long time..but now its important for us to change our way of living for a better tomorrow.
Big companies like BPL have also joined cause like-Green Day..
http://studylite.in/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=10&Itemid=16&cid=cm