Lumileds Blog

In professional applications such as entertainment and theater lighting, manufacturers of color-mixing luminaires can draw on a broad palette of color LEDs. With a range of primary and non-primary LED colors to choose from, they can enable good color rendering while maintaining high saturation for the primary colors: red, green, and blue.

Conventional two- or three-channel approaches to color tuning are complex and expensive. LUXEON Fusion produces better performance with fewer LEDs at lower system cost.

In just two decades, Light Emitting Diodes have become the world’s universal light source and there is no sign that LED innovation will stop anytime soon...

Circadian lighting is a term that has gained popularity in recent years – you may have also heard it referred to as ‘human-centric lighting’ or ‘tunable lighting’ or mentioned in the context of biophilia. While these are more often used as buzzwords, circadian lighting is an area of real research, science, and innovation.

The computing industry has long operated according to the principle of garbage in, garbage out. Computer scientists know that the insights derived from the analysis of a database are only useful and reliable if the raw data on which they are based are sound...The same principle applies in lighting. No matter how much care is devoted to controls, LED drivers or to sophisticated secondary lenses, if the raw light source is compromised, so is the luminaire’s light output.

Colored lighting often plays an equivalent role in professional lighting design to seasoning, spice and herbs in the professional kitchen. Color elevates the user’s appreciation of a space or a structure, changing it from something effective and useful into an experience that the user enjoys, likes, or even marvels at.

It would be easy for self-congratulation to be the default attitude of an LED manufacturer. After all, when LEDs replace an incandescent light source, the amount of in-use electricity consumed drops by around 90%. This reduces the GHG emissions attributable to lighting, and helps to slow the pace of global warming.

The most widely used of these control functions is dimming, and so it is perhaps surprising that the design of certain types of dimming luminaires is problematic. This is because of a common but undesirable characteristic of traditional LEDs: in any typical reel of supposedly identical LEDs shipped to a luminaire manufacturer, the flux (brightness) of one, or a string of LEDs, when dimmed will be visibly different from the flux of its neighbor, even though both are connected to the same driver.

The LED story though is one of continuous innovation in LED technology, and since the turn of the century, innovation has led to a complete transformation: the white LED has become the lighting industry’s mainstream light source. So does that mean it’s job done? Far from it – the innovation in LED technology continues. In many ways, we have only just begun.

When you were young and learning to draw, were you one of the tikes who kept reaching into the crayon box to pull out the next color, working it onto a white page to see how it looked, blending and playing colors off one another or pressing hard then soft to see different effects? It is the same with LED lighting today. More options are better. In defining every color of the rainbow, like different flavors of ice cream, designers want more color choices to create more opportunities for great satiation.