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Carmanah Supplies Solar Powered Marine Lanterns for Gulf Oil Spill Containment Efforts
LIGHTimes News Staff
June 17, 2010...Carmanah Technologies Corp. through its marine partnership with Sabik Oy is providing Carmanah/Sabik solar LED marine lanterns for marking oil spill containment booms in the Gulf of Mexico. The lanterns help to keep marine traffic safe while containment and cleanup work continues in the area.
Carmanah's authorized marine distributor in Texas helped deploy several hundred white and yellow Carmanah/Sabik Model 502 and M650 solar LED marine lanterns to mark areas such as open bays and waterways where the presence of containment booms poses a risk to vessels attempting to navigate the area.
Carmanah reports that it is also working with a Houston-based manufacturing partner to quickly produce and deliver several hundred additional lights in the coming days.
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Everlight, Epistar and TPV to Form LED Packaging Joint Venture
LIGHTimes News Staff
June 17, 2010...Everlight Electronics, Epistar, and TPV Technology will establish a joint venture for LED chip packaging and LED light strip production in Fuzhou City in China's Fujian Province, according to the companies. TPV is a dominant LCD TV maker. So, Everlight is attempting to secure both orders and supply with the joint venture.
The total investment in the venture will be NT$800 million (US$24.79 million).
Of the total, Everlight will contribute 65 percent, TPV 25 perrcent, and Epistar 10 percent.
Earlier in June, Everlight, Amtran Technology, and LG display announced plans to jointly form another packaging facility in Wujiang City of Jiangsu Province, China.
Everlight says that the cooperation with Amtran and LG should allow it to secure orders and shipments to two of the world's largest TV vendors, Samsung Electronics and Vizio, which is affiliated to Amtran. (Ref: Coverage).
Everlight also reportedly invested in LED chipmakers Epistar, Formosa Epitaxy, Tekcore, and Huga Optotech to ensure LED chip supplies if and when demand for LED TV and lighting devices explodes as expected.
NNCrystal Makes Qshift Coral Quantom Dots Available
LIGHTimes News Staff
June 17, 2010...NNCrystal US Corporation reports that it is making its QShift Coral colloidal nanocrystals (quantum dots) available after the recent successfully completed review by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). According to the company, its QShift Coral technology enables fine tuning of light to precisely control its color. NNCrystal claims that its Qshift Coral technology makes lighting warmer and of higher quality, while reducing energy consumption for the same lumen output compared with traditional phosphor-based warm white lighting. (Ref: Coverage). LIGHTimes SecondPage members login for more. Guests can view membership details.
NIST Outlines Proposed Metric CQS to Replace CRI
LIGHTimes News Staff
June 15, 2010...The National Institute of Standards and Technology has issued a paper outlining the methodology for a proposed standard to replace the commonly used Color Rendering Index (CRI). Critics of the CRI measurement are quick to point out its limitations and the history of the measurement as a way to compare fluorescent lighting.
The NIST notes that CRI is a 40-year-old measurement that has issues when used to evaluate white LED lighting. The NIST's technical committee TC 1-62 concluded that the CRI score does not correlate well with the visual evaluation in many cases. Some of these cases include instances of color saturation and color shift that can change the color discrimination ability and visual clarity of a given light. In such cases a high CRI may not actually mean good light quality.
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LED Lighting is a Consultative Process...
Tom Griffiths - Publisher
June 10, 2010...One of the things that the LED lighting industry gets knocked for is "not having the standards in place" to make it easy on the lighting decision makers. First, that's simply not true, but a standards roundup can easily set you up for a full day of reading. More importantly, it appears that the perception is that solid state lighting should somehow be easier to implement that other lighting is. After all, electronics make things simpler, don't they?
It's a common misconception, or probably better, "selective memory condition", that technology makes things simpler. That's kind of like saying, "water is never dangerous", or for that matter, "water is often dangerous". Your choice. If you pick one, you're wrong, since it all depends on what kind it is, and what you're doing with it. As an insulator while you're working on power lines, it's kind of dangerous. In a water gun that kids are shooting each other with, not dangerous. Whatever we pick, can be taken to any extreme to prove or disprove the supposition, so please no letters from chemists to remind us that ultra-pure water is actually a pretty good insulator, or from safety freaks who can only envision the SuperSoaker Mk. XXLIV 400 psi model in the hands of 4 year-olds. In the middle 80% of the circumstances, common sense prevails in comparing the application with the risks.
Technology quite often makes things faster, or more efficient. An spreadsheet on my computer is a much faster way to add up columns, then sum then across, and find the percentage growth, but building the spreadsheet wasn't simpler than operating a calculator and pencil. Some level of specialized knowledge was needed. Once we know it, it can be simpler, but it's not automatic. You still have to figure out where to enable "auto set" on the clock for your DVD player (which is why many DVD players don't display the time, I suspect... the legacy of the flashing 12:00 on the VCR needed to be left behind to achieve true customer satisfaction). And technology does often make things simpler, but mostly from the maintenance stand point. Cars last longer and need fewer components for a tune-up. A refrigerator defrosts itself magically at 2am (there's actually a little heating element in ours that melts and evaporates what it's melting). Well-designed and constructed LED lights get installed, run for a decade, and then get replaced. Better technology and simpler maintenance don't necessarily imply easier installation, and definitely does not make for simpler selection. The more complex the technology, in fact, the more difficult the selection process may be, and the more likely you will need to tap your, or someone else's, expertise to make a good decision.
LED lighting is that way. Solid state doesn't mean simpler. I contend it does mean "better and more reliable" (when done correctly). So how does a facility lighting decision maker, for instance, figure out the correct answer? From the pure lighting aspect, they can rely on the same engineering approach that has worked for many decades. The concepts of beam angle and center beam candlepower, and foot-candles a the target, and light loss factors apply just as they always have. In fact, those metrics probably matter even more when you're looking at the increased acquisition costs of those "higher tech" LED-based lights. Precision matters. If you're used to winging it, you might be leaving a lot of money on the table that a lighting designer or other qualified lighting expert may have enabled you to save. "Too much light" takes on a increased significance when the cost per lumen is many times more than it was for the previous approaches.
More significant are the decision factors that are totally new in the lighting equation. Whose LEDs are inside. If you want them to stay the same color as they started, it kind of matters, since it's not a simple swap out. Whose drivers are inside. A bad ballast could be swapped out, but not so with bad drivers, especially when they may not manifest their inferiority until well past the warranty period. A 5-year payback isn't a payback if you only get a 4-year life from the product. How does the product look? Have shadowing effects been handled? Will it work with your dimmers or other controls, beyond just "theoretically"? All of those will be answers that come from experience, and most likely, the facilities expert or architect won't have that expertise yet.
So who does have those answers when it comes to LED lighting? Some lighting designers and some lighting consultants have the right kind of experience, and they're working to catch up (that's why they come to the SSL Summit series... NY agenda just updated!). Some solutions providers/sales organization, as well as some rep organizations, do have the answers, and you can tell which simply by asking how many different solid state lighting products, other than the lines they carry, they have evaluated and tested first hand. If it hasn't been at least double or triple the number the solutions provider is working with, they probably are short on necessary experience in separating the good and the OK, from the bad.
Finally, every quality manufacturer has the expertise, although they may or may not be active with the customers to apply it, if they have a well-trained rep/sales force that they have delegated it to. You also may run into the good manufacturers being less responsive than you might like, especially if you're working in the onesy-twosy mode. Just because a product is in volume production, don't take that to mean "in commodity supply". Some very sharp manufacturers are necessarily filtering whom they work with, as their solution is limited in the number of "cost effective" applications by the current performance and cost curves that the industry is handing them. A call for "can I buy a couple to try" might not be returned if you don't have the volume, or aren't providing the information that helps them to be sure your application meets their standards for success. Others may need to know that they will be able to actually "partner" with the user to assure a cost-effective retrofit and sensible deployment plan, since the last thing they want to see is a stack of luminaires returned because "they didn't work right" when they are working exactly as specified. For most applications out there now, adopting solid state lighting needs to be a consultative process to assure that the expected payback will really be achieved. There will be a number of segments that will move commodity at the point that simple price/performance surpasses the incumbents, but that will be a long while, yet. Even then, the more consultative suppliers will likely turn out to have ultimately more cost effective solutions because they will see that those solutions are correctly applied. The best answer for the business case to be real now is to not be small, and to tap real expertise.
To find industry quality, you might need to look to the one executive-level conference that demands it, SSL Design's 2010/2011 SSL Summit Series, September 14-15 in New York, and January 19-20, 2011 in Los Angeles. Speakers, showcase participants and even sponsors are vetted for their ability to show lighting decision makers quality LED lighting solutions, or to enable those solutions with quality componentry. Attendees will find not just choices, but the relationships that will bring success to their projects.
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