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We get
it. Any time you see "Super" in some description of a
product, immediately you tend to recoil. Super this, super
that. The ad wizards of the 70's killed the word for most
commercial application but with LED lights, it's not just
some hokey branding title. Super bright actually means
something when describing LED light. Super bright has a
very real meaning with LED lighting and it's a primary
reason why many people seek out this solution until, of
course, they realize how much they can save by switching to
LED's. For functions where the quantity of light is
important, let's take a look at what "Super bright" really
means.
First,
what's our measure of brightness? The best yardstick
(excuse the word) is the humble lumen. Lumen is a measure
of the quantity of photons (the smallest individual packet
of light) that are delivered. Lumens is what we really want
to measure when looking at brightness with a secondary role
for the "color" of light. This is more a perceptual effect
as our eyes (actually the brain) process different
wavelengths of light. We'll look at both aspects and
explain how to get the brightest, or super bright light
through LED's. First, let's tackle the lumens part of our
equation.
Lumens
are very easy to quantify. 1000 lumens is twice as bright
or intense a light as 500 lumens if generated at the same
"color" (generally measured in Kelvin for temperature of
light). Why are LED's so good at producing Lumen's? Well,
you could say it's the most efficient means of turning
electrons (measure of electricity) into photons. To
understand why, let's look at the other commercially
available sources of light. Incandescents use the
resistance to electrons (not a good start to efficiency) of
a given material to electrons to heat the material and then
generate light. Most of the electric energy is being turned
into heat. 90% in fact. Light is almost a bi-product of
this method. The light generated is based on a "black body
cavity" means and the wavelengths are generally very broad
(many different colors of lights). Great if we want to heat
a space. Fluorescents are more efficient but in a very
round about way. They excite a contained gas which absorbs
electrons and spits out photons. The problem is that the
wavelength of the light is dependent on the gas and energy
jump so the light has a very peculiar quality as you may
have noticed when looking at fluorescents. LED's are
simpler. The diode drives electricity to a material that
absorbs it and then generates a resulting photon. The
efficiency of this method is significantly better than the
other two methods as a measure of how many photons are
generated for a certain amount of incoming electricity.
This allows an LED to produce large amounts of lumens which
translates into very intense or bright light. Based on
this, we can reduce our wattage significantly and still
generate the same brightness of light if not brighter.
What
about color of the light. Generally speaking, the higher
Kelvin of light, the whiter or brighter we perceive the
color. A 5000 K light is considered to be bright white.
Around 3500 would be daylight and lower than 3000, would be
"warm" light which has a yellow or red hue in terms of how
we perceive it. Certain venues such as hospitals, office,
industrial, and outdoor lights probably don't want to foster
a warm, snuggly, "let's take a nap" kind of vibe so bright
or superbright light is the right way to go. We associate
this light quality with being away, alert, and clean. Super
bright, when describing light, is generally thought of as
having a large lumen count with a high Kelvin color and our
LED lights can selected and color-tuned accordingly.
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