LED lights question

[Anonymous]

Hey everybody, i have a simple question with LED lights.

When I had the light go out on my truck a few months back i picked up a bulb, and talked with the guy at the store. He told me not to use the colored bulbes with a colored lense. proper use was clear bulb, colored lense or vice versa.

with the LEDs being colored is it a problem to run them behind a colored lense like with standard bulbs, or do you need the clear/color combination.

Thanks all

[Clone]

Your led should be either white or the same color as your lens. The white leds are more expensive than colored ones. So if you are cheap like me you use a colored one.

[Planecrazy]

It makes absolutely no difference electronically (as long as the replacement LED matches the specs of the original) which ones you use, but if you use a colored lens you'll probably see a reduction in brightness versus using the clear ones...

Steve 8)

[Mr. Jiggles]

Be careful with LED's - I've read in a few places that some brands of LED's can actually be dimmer than incandescents.

[Anonymous]

so is there any LED that is better or worse that you know about?

[Clone]

As for brands, I don't know, I make my own leds. But, because you are using it in a reflector made for an incandescent, look at the Leds that have a ring of emitters around the light at 90 degrees to the axis(does that make sense?). There are two levels to the led, one that points straight back and another level that points off to the side. These will give you the best possible visibility.

An engineer who designs led traffic controls explained to me that Leds are not as bright as an incandescent, (he said because brightness is a reflected quality). But that an led has a more directed light, so if you do not look into the directed arc of the led, it will seem dim. If you look into the lit arc of the led it will seem very intense. The advantage he reports with led emitters is that they are efficient, using less power, and visually stimulating because they are either on or off, there is no increase or decrease to the light as with an incandescent when it is turned on and off.
Actually a lot of what he said went over my head, lux, lumen, candella, etc. He had to dumb it down for me.

[Mr. Jiggles]

so is there any LED that is better or worse that you know about?

Check out http://www.webbikeworld.com/r2/led/led.htm for info