I recently came across some of the pictures that I used in early my watsonseblog, sometime around the mid 2000s.\u00a0 From 2000 when white\u00a0 LEDs were very expensive and difficult to obtain, the LED flashlights (torches) were very expensive.\u00a0 Generally, a LED flashlight with a few 5mm white LEDs would cost several tens of dollars U.S.\u00a0 One that threw a decent beam might cost 80, 100 or more dollars U.S.\u00a0 The manufacturers – I remember Lumileds was one of the first – started developing white LEDs that were larger than 5mm, with power up to 1 watt.<\/p>\n
Jump ahead a decade and we can find flashlights with 9 white LEDs on the store shelf for 4, 3, or even 2 dollars,\u00a0 Ten years earlier, just a single one of those LEDs would have cost that much.\u00a0 The prices have come down a lot and the light output has increased dramatically.<\/p>\n
One other phenomenon has come about i that time.\u00a0 The overseas companies, especially China and Hing Cong have been making flashlights out of solid aluminum that are inexpensive, put out a lot of light, and use only a single AA or AAA cell, so the cost of operation is low.\u00a0 One would think that it would be very hard to compete with this winning combination.<\/p>\n
But the cheap 9 LED lights I see on the store shelf don’t have that one advantage; they use three AAA cells so the cost of replacing the three could be two dollars, more than half the cost of the flashlight.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I recently came across some of the pictures that I used in early my watsonseblog, sometime around the mid 2000s.\u00a0 From 2000 when white\u00a0 LEDs were very expensive and difficult to obtain, the LED flashlights (torches) were very expensive.\u00a0 Generally, a LED flashlight with a few 5mm white LEDs would cost several tens of dollars <\/p>\n (Read More…)<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7234","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7234","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7234"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7234\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7573,"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7234\/revisions\/7573"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7234"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7234"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7234"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}