LEDs to Brighten Flat Panels, Lighting

When it comes to television, would you want brighter, more colorful pictures? When it comes to home lighting, would you want more design variety and cooler options? And when it comes to energy and the environment, would you want electricity savings and less toxic waste?

Most people will say "yes," and that's what supporters of the emerging light emitting diode (LED) technology are banking on.

Boasting a much longer lifespan than conventional light sources, the solid-state LED appears well-suited for similar staying power within the custom electronics industry.

Thanks in part to companies such as Luminus Devices and Color Kinetics, installers like Nick Tamburri and legislation from the forward-thinking state of California, in 2007 we might hear the letters LED a lot in our alphabet soup-filled industry.

"It has a lot of positives. It's still a little pricey, but there are a lot of pluses," says Tamburri, president of Newark, N.J.-based Aggressive Home Automation & Design. "Even if you don't sell [an LED lighting system] to a client, no one else is going to show it to them and you get that respect -- and you'll see their eyebrows come up when you show it."

At Woburn, Mass.-based Luminus Devices, the focus is more on the role LEDs will play in how we see television. The belief is that eyebrows will indeed be raised and jaws will drop with the implementation of Luminus' patented LED-based PhlatLight (short for photonic lattices) technology in large-screen DLP and LCD sets.

"You can have a much wider color gamut, so images look much more real. If you're watching a football game, the grass on the field really pops out," says Luminus founder and CTO Alexei Erchak.

"Most displays give you less than 100 percent of the NTSC standard, but LED is 140 percent or even above, so now you have access to colors that are just starting to become available with content."

Wide-Ranging Benefits

Both Tamburri and Erchak serve up several reasons why LED is advantageous in residential and commercial applications, including lifespan, temperature, color, wattage, size, versatility, environmental friendliness and -- despite the comparative higher price than conventional lighting -- overall cost when efficacy is factored in.

In October, Luminus announced that its PhlatLight PT120 chipset was being sampled to its microdisplay projection television customers, specifically optimized for use with Texas Instruments' xHD5 1080p DLP technology chipset.

The PT120 includes red, green and blue LEDs combined as a single chipset that can cycle at 2.9 kHz, last more than 60,000 hours and output 10 to 100 times more light than normal LEDs, according to Luminus. The chip will augment the LED presence Luminus has with TV makers such as Samsung and NuVision, and Erchak has bold aspirations for the future of large-screen DLP and LCD displays.

"DLP is just the start. What we'd like to do from there is illuminate LCD flat-panels on the wall," Erchak says.

"Over the next five years, Luminus' goal is to replace lighting for all new models, so there are no more lamps in [large-screen] projection TVs. People have been trying to put LEDs in LCDs for a while now, but nobody has been able to commercialize it because the dollars and cents don't match up and it's really been a force fit. PhlatLight is specifically designed for it."

Erchak says Luminus has demonstrated, in partnership with manufacturer Global Lighting Technologies, a prototype LCD backlight that incorporates a flat sheet of light instead of rows of cold cathode fluorescent lamps (CCFL). He expects prototypes available by the end of 2007 and 10 percent to 25 percent of LCDs manufactured with this technology in 2008.

"We want them to last long, have the best color and LED green technology," says Erchak. "LCDs and high-intensity lamps all contain toxic substances (like mercury) that people will eventually want to remove. There's a trend toward consumers being environmentally conscious. Europe is moving toward banning CCFL lamps, and the only reason it hasn't happened yet is because there isn't another option."

For large-screen displays, Erchak also points to energy savings as a viable reason for choosing an LED-source TV over plasma, for example. "Instead of buying a 50-inch plasma that will eat up 500 watts, the DLP is running on 150, so if you do some math and make some assumptions about average viewing time, you pretty much get a free TV in a few years."

Light Show

Tamburri champions Boston-based manufacturer Color Kinetics when it comes to providing the supplies as well as educational tools to installers about LED technology. Among the features of the company's thorough Web site are a library of White Papers, tutorials and even a showcase finder that allows you to search actual installations by product, control, industry sector and location.

Color Kinetics' ColorPlay software can be used to demo lighting possibilities by allowing users to combine color and design shows. Tamburri says this application makes it easy to present LED demos to clients in their own houses.

Because of LEDs' true colors and low heat emission, placement options and scene settings become greatly expanded for lighting control systems. "Your everyday under-counter light goes on and you can dim it -- big deal.

But now you're dealing with scenes of color, so all of a sudden [whatever you want to highlight] comes to life and you don't have to worry about any heat that builds up," Tamburri says. "For the people that want the 'cool' factor, it's feasible but you can't talk about this -- you really have to show people."

As examples, Tamburri cites a wine cellar his company backlit in a deep blue for "a nice, soothing effect" and exterior elements such as fountains and fish ponds that can dazzle with background or even submersible lighting.

Aggressive Home Automation also outfitted a hot night spot, 381 Main, with LED lighting -- the ambiance can match the colorful array of trendy drinks it sells.

"That's a lost art today," says Tamburri.

Embracing for the Future

Color Kinetics found a highly interested audience when it met with dealers of the Home Theater Specialists of America (HTSA) last fall. Color Kinetics sales rep Chris Smith-Petersen noted that pricing is dealer-friendly and that LEDS are "low-voltage, so you don't have to be a licensed electrician to install them."

The company was also in the spotlight recently with November's release of 20th Century Fox's holiday film "Deck the Halls," whose tagline "There glows the neighborhood" reflects the movie's plot about dueling neighbors. Color Kinetics provided the LED technology to transform one of the houses into an incredible multimedia light show and make it the star of the film.

Perhaps it was fitting that Hollywood embraced LEDs since the California Energy Commission recently adopted the 2005 Building Energy Efficiency Standards for Residential and Nonresidential Buildings.

In doing so, updates to the state's Title 24 residential lighting code include standards designed to reduce lighting energy consumption. The LED installation in "Deck the Halls" consisted of 14,300 LED nodes, which at full intensity drew only 7,150 watts of energy, according to Color Kinetics.

The company's estimate of electricity to light a similar extravaganza with conventional lighting would require about 100,100 watts -- without the programming capability.