It Should make you Wonder

Erik Sine · June 24, 2016

It really should make you wonder when you have a LED Sales rep / Lighting Engineer talking to you over the phone trying to sell you their LED's who are a Sign Company NOW also branching out to sell their LED's which I think everyone has seen in all the sign magazines now where they ship you off their little "light box". I'm sure you know who I'm talking about.

I asked him where their LED's are being made, "China...they're the brightest....with very little light decay and will last 11 years" he replied.

"I see........Uhh..who is the diode manufacturer?" I replied

"I Can't tell you" he said.

"You don't know?" I followed up with.

"No, I know....I just can't release" he said.

"Why is that?" I asked.

"It's proprietary information...it's our secret sauce formula you know?"

"It's a secret?....that makes me cautious actually. As you know there are a lot bad diode manufacturer's and grades of each Diode......that doesn't make me confident in not knowing who you are using" I ended our conversation with.

For a LED product manufacturer not to tell you who they are using is NOT good, it also should tell you their not that confident either. It means you will be retrofitting your customers signs out shortly after!

I'm VERY confident and PROUD to tell you what diodes we have in our products, Samsung and Nichia!

Finally we can also proudly say that these products are NOT made in CHINA!!!!

megavolt512 · June 29, 2016

I'm starting to see a lot of LED sellers claim their products are "LM79 and LM80 certified" - yet there is no mention of what these tests actually revealed. My understanding is that LM79 measures total luminous flux, luminous efficacy, light distribution, and a few others. It's not a pass-fail type of test, it's a report that can be used to evaluate a product.

Modules, etc. from everyone seem to be getting better, but it's definitely still buyer-beware.

Erik Sine · June 29, 2016

These tests are also used to project life of a product. I'm not sure how they take a few thousands hours and say that said product will last 30k/50k without failure or very little light loss, but they do. Neon and fluorescent easy to project as it;'s just gradual but LED's, graph it and it's all over the chart, lol.

I still haven't seen a whole lot dependability on bright products for the sign industry. The Sloans and GE's play it safe on under powering theirs and charging a whole lot for it, playing it safe is equaling out to light output compared to conventional light sources. I still see a ton of failure's all around town even with new signs, and signs hitting that 20k mark. Lot's of re-retrofitting going on and lot's of people entering the game thinking they can just bring in overseas not knowing the makeup, and as you said it is "buyer-beware"