White LEDs // LED White Light

I never dream of a white Christmas (having 6 months of cold each year truly and honestly makes me dream only of a tropical and warm Christmas). I never dream about a big white wedding (I mean, a comfy pair of jeans and Elvis in Vegas sounds like a much better story for the grandkids). I don’t even dream about living in the White House (I mean, why would I, I do lighting, not politics). But what I do dream about is THE white LED. Yeah...I know...

The white LED is the Holy Grail in the lighting industry. He who holds the white LED holds the fortunes (I should be a fortune cookie writer…note to self-possible career change...wonder how it pays).

When I write about white LED products I purposely say “LED white light.” It’s because, although it’s acceptable in the industry to say white LED product (and mean white light), I don’t want to be accused by the LEDs of being politically incorrect. In the past 1-2 years we’ve seen an explosion of white light LED products hit the market (some that are great, some that weren’t ready, some that are tolerable, and some in the middle). But they’re not white LEDs.

LED white light is typically made up in variations of three ways:

1. By using a red, blue, green LED combined at full to give you white light. It works, it’s not the best white light out there, giving mediocre color rendering, but if you want a fixture with color changing abilities, the ability to put RGB to full and get a version of white light is only an added bonus. In theory, too, if you have RGB and control over the intensities of the colors, you can make yourself a better looking white to match your need.

2. By using a blue LED covered in a phosphor that gives it a white appearance. If you want to put yourself into a Wiki coma reading about blue LED phosphor, please feel free. Essentially depending on the chemical mix of the phosphor used it will create different colors of white light. I know some great products that use this method, and if it's a quality product, using quality LEDs then you should have a good white. If you don't...then you could end up with a variation of white that may not be a good one, that may be a completely different color than the other part in a 2-pack, or even 6 different whites in a 6-pack. (A mfg. named Color Kinetics combats this very issue with a proprietary binning method I will talk about in a future post).

3. And the third and final method I’m bursting with excitement to discuss is Cree LED Lighting's TrueWhite Technology. The phrase is trademarked. The method is patented (I think). And it’s easy to see why, because it’s amazing what they’re doing and on the surface it seems so simplistic, but Cree LED Lighting….they hit the ball out of the park on this one.
Cree LED Lighting's TrueWhite Technology:
They use a proprietary mix of yellow and red LEDs to create the white light. That’s the ‘seems so simplistic’ part. Then, every fixture (and now, every lamp) has an active color management system, which is a chip inside of the fixture that reads the light output and adjusts the red &/or yellow LEDs as necessary to maintain the same color temperature. All LEDs, over time, fade. And LEDs age (fade) at different rates. As the red LEDs fade and the yellow fade, at different rates remember, the other will adjust by getting more or less bright to maintain the same color temperature. This means if you have 100 LR6 downlights in an office building, in 5 years, they will all look like each other. And then you go to add 50 more…those will look the same, too.
Other methods of white lighting with LEDs are not as reliable. LEDs are not an exact science. You could buy 10 LED bulbs, all say 3500K, all from the same bulb mfg., all with LEDs from the same LED mfg. and you could plug them in side-by-side and they are then all different variations of colors. One may be a little greenish, one a little pink, one a little too warm, etc. Imagine all those bulbs are inside of a large fixture that’s telling the yellowish one and the greenish to burn less bright, and has the pink one burn at max to produce the PERFECT 3500K you were promised. That is what Cree LED Lighting is doing and it’s in EVERY FIXTURE. It’s not an adder and the products equipped with this fantastic technology aren’t priced higher than comparable products (in fact the LR6, at under $100, is one of the lower priced LED downlights on the market).
It is also important to note that the mfg. Cree makes LEDs that other companies use in their products, as they are one of the handful of LED manufacturers who produce well made LEDs. Cree LED Lighting is a division of Cree that uses the technology and colored LEDs as I describe above specifically in their products.
PLEASE NOTE: I do not work for Cree and they’re not paying me to write this (but if you’re with Cree and reading this and want to, please drop me a line).

This all leads to one last question: Who's up for a tropical Christmas?

Meet you in MAUI!!!!