Crapity Crap!, LED lights offer NO "improvement" Options

[Qarl]

I received the LED prototypes in today. Red, Blue, and Superbright white. The superbright white is really just a wavelength of blue.

I can honestly say they are not any brighter than the incandescent bulbs. The good news is that the inverted lense actually disperses the light about the same as the incandescent bulb, thus doing away with problem that the LED lights are directional in natuure.

I think that the size of the LED is the issue. I big LED will most definitely be brighter, but you run into size problems with the lamp base.

It has only three advantages I can think of.

1. Last longer
2. Color choices
3. Will not fade and yellow over time.

So... I don't think it is really worth going through the expense of importing some in from overseas.

Sorry to get everyone's hopes up. I guess that's part of the experimentation process.

I am still waiting to hear back about the halogen fog bulbs though.

[dmenche914]

The regular lights in the instruments seem bright enough to me. Just make sure you have good 12 volts to the bulbs. If you need color, I recall seeing at one time little transluscent "condoms" that slip over the bulbs, in colors.

I know there is an outfit out of Australia that sells halogen extra brightness bulbs for automotive, not sure if it is for instruments or not, but they had tail light bulbs.


Used to work on NASA Space Station at Ames we worked on plant growth tests to grow food in space. we designed and built large arrays of red, Green Blue LED's we could vary the power to each color,and hence change the total color. turn them all up evenly and we got white light. Purpose was to vary the light color to determine optimal color for plant growth using low power. (power is limited on space station) this was when blue first came out, somthing like $5 each for blue, and about 5 cents each for red and green. We used about 10,000 LEDS in the arrays.


dave