LED Lights

Light Emitting Diode (LED) lights cannot produce white light. These special lights can only produce specific colors in the spectrum. Led lights are fairly new to technology. These lights have the ability to give off high intensity illumination. Though they do not produce white light, this can be accomplished using other methods.

Combining a yellow phosphor with blue LED lights will generate a white light. This is a softer white light that does not provide enough light for reading. Did you know that white LED lights are commonly used as backlighting in cellular phones? Dashboards in your car may also be lit with this type of LED lighting.

When combining green, blue, and red phosphors with ultraviolet LED, you will also have the end result of white light. White LED lights offer 20 lumens per watt. This is better than incandescent lighting yet not as well as fluorescent lighting. This type of LED lighting produces a much brighter white light, useful for reading.

In the early 1990's, Nichia Corporation offered one of the first gallium nitride based blue LED's. Later they would offer white LED lights from a blue LED die, in 1996. This company holds many of the patents for a wide range of LED's and for years held the rights to the technology used in creating white LED's with phosphors. Currently white LED's are available in mobile phones and many other devices.

Nichia Corporation has also come out with new high powered LED lights and together with Toyoda Gosei Co. Ltd. they are supplying this high powered LED. These two companies have developed a higher and more efficient version and feel that by the year 2206, white LED's will be replacing conventional lighting.

More and more companies are developing their own white LED's. In Japan, they are developing many LED light bulb shapes and hope to have all shapes needed for traditional lighting fixtures sometime in the future. The cost of these LED lights will be 10 to 30 percent higher than the average incandescent light bulb. At the center for lighting and display, they predict while LED's with 200 watts will be common place in the year 2007.