How Blue LEDs Were Invented - LGR Tech Tales
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Date: 2022-04-14
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Comments and reviews: 10
greenaum
White LEDs also led to colour LCD displays on other things, of course, notably the Gameboy Advance was one of the early ones. Prior to that, the Game Gear and Lynx had to use a fluorescent tube as a backlight. Hence why they were so heavy and thick, and drank batteries. Nintendo chose right with the monochrome Gameboy, colour LCDs weren't practical until white LED backlights. An exception is laptops, where the backlight was a comparable power draw to the hard disk and many chips. They had much larger batteries. The reason only the top-end laptops were colour rather than mono is more to do with a colour LCD panel needing 3x the pixel elements, and past a certain size an LCD panel had too many flaws (bad pixels.
Some early laptops had monochrome, usually orange, plasma panels. Remember plasma? Like thousands of little neon lights.
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White LEDs also led to colour LCD displays on other things, of course, notably the Gameboy Advance was one of the early ones. Prior to that, the Game Gear and Lynx had to use a fluorescent tube as a backlight. Hence why they were so heavy and thick, and drank batteries. Nintendo chose right with the monochrome Gameboy, colour LCDs weren't practical until white LED backlights. An exception is laptops, where the backlight was a comparable power draw to the hard disk and many chips. They had much larger batteries. The reason only the top-end laptops were colour rather than mono is more to do with a colour LCD panel needing 3x the pixel elements, and past a certain size an LCD panel had too many flaws (bad pixels.
Some early laptops had monochrome, usually orange, plasma panels. Remember plasma? Like thousands of little neon lights.
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DJ
My god do I hate LED's. Ok so I'm a concert photographer. Smaller venues now rely heavily on blue and red LED's for stage lighting, rather than using traditional gels, this had the advantage of running cooler and save on energy bills. But just like you can see at 9: 21, the LED's saturate the camera's sensor as they only produce one specific wavelength of light. And this leads to mucky, saturated low detail photos. That is if your auto focus can lock onto the subject at all. Which is kinda necessary in a live concert. And while you could intriduce other LED's to offer a more natural looking tone, few gigs do it, and ops for the heavily saturated look instead. Reds are even worse.
Basically, LED's have ruined stage lighting and any venue using them deserves to be leveled by an orbital laser strike.
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My god do I hate LED's. Ok so I'm a concert photographer. Smaller venues now rely heavily on blue and red LED's for stage lighting, rather than using traditional gels, this had the advantage of running cooler and save on energy bills. But just like you can see at 9: 21, the LED's saturate the camera's sensor as they only produce one specific wavelength of light. And this leads to mucky, saturated low detail photos. That is if your auto focus can lock onto the subject at all. Which is kinda necessary in a live concert. And while you could intriduce other LED's to offer a more natural looking tone, few gigs do it, and ops for the heavily saturated look instead. Reds are even worse.
Basically, LED's have ruined stage lighting and any venue using them deserves to be leveled by an orbital laser strike.
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Baron
-A few- years ago (I'm thinking circa 2012) I was paying upwards of $15 each for 450 lumen LEDs that ran at 8-12 watts. Now I can go to the dollar store and get 8w, 800 lumen bulbs for about 7% of the cost of the (dimmer) bulbs that are still running years later. On top of that, my solar panels gather enough power to run them even on the cloudiest of days. And I still think back to the uproar we saw when efforts were made to phase out the old 100w incandescent heaters in favor of the CFLs that are now -also- inefficient by comparison to LEDs. #LEDFanBoy
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-A few- years ago (I'm thinking circa 2012) I was paying upwards of $15 each for 450 lumen LEDs that ran at 8-12 watts. Now I can go to the dollar store and get 8w, 800 lumen bulbs for about 7% of the cost of the (dimmer) bulbs that are still running years later. On top of that, my solar panels gather enough power to run them even on the cloudiest of days. And I still think back to the uproar we saw when efforts were made to phase out the old 100w incandescent heaters in favor of the CFLs that are now -also- inefficient by comparison to LEDs. #LEDFanBoy
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albedo
Thank you very much for bringing up a more physics Tech Tale, which is very well and accurately explained! I am doing research on printed organic LEDs and we're facing quite similar challenges those days. Although companies such as Samsung and BOE are doing consumer Products including blue OLEDs, their lifetime, efficiency and colour purity is still the major issue to be solved. The shorter the wavelength, the higher is the energy per photon. But those high-bandgap materials tend to be very unstable in active state.
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Thank you very much for bringing up a more physics Tech Tale, which is very well and accurately explained! I am doing research on printed organic LEDs and we're facing quite similar challenges those days. Although companies such as Samsung and BOE are doing consumer Products including blue OLEDs, their lifetime, efficiency and colour purity is still the major issue to be solved. The shorter the wavelength, the higher is the energy per photon. But those high-bandgap materials tend to be very unstable in active state.
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Trurl
It's interesting that there is still ongoing progress in making blue/white LEDs brighter, cheaper and more power efficient.
For example, the most recent (early 2019) LED bulbs by Osram and Phillips provide 800 lumens at just 7 watts. The previous generation required 8, 5 watts and was notably larger. I think it's not long till cars will have pure LED headlights.
By the way, OLED screens do not use classical LEDs. Only LCDs use LEDs, namely as background light. OLED is a different technology.
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It's interesting that there is still ongoing progress in making blue/white LEDs brighter, cheaper and more power efficient.
For example, the most recent (early 2019) LED bulbs by Osram and Phillips provide 800 lumens at just 7 watts. The previous generation required 8, 5 watts and was notably larger. I think it's not long till cars will have pure LED headlights.
By the way, OLED screens do not use classical LEDs. Only LCDs use LEDs, namely as background light. OLED is a different technology.
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fanjoy
The 90's for the release of commercially available blue LEDs doesn't sound right. I was in high school in the 80's and around '85 - '86, I did work experience after school one day a week for the local Dick Smith Electronics store in NZ, and they had blue LEDs then. They weren't exactly affordable though; at a time when red, orange, yellow, and green LEDs usually cost less than $1, blue LEDs were about $15!
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The 90's for the release of commercially available blue LEDs doesn't sound right. I was in high school in the 80's and around '85 - '86, I did work experience after school one day a week for the local Dick Smith Electronics store in NZ, and they had blue LEDs then. They weren't exactly affordable though; at a time when red, orange, yellow, and green LEDs usually cost less than $1, blue LEDs were about $15!
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FrontSideBus
It's funny how things work. When blue LED's became affordable, I modded every PC I had back then to use blue LED's for the power and HDD activity ect. Now, however I can't stand the things and anything that comes with one as standard now gets modded back to the old colours of red, green or yellow lol. I modded my modern Corsair case to have a green/red power LED and a yellow HDD LED.
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It's funny how things work. When blue LED's became affordable, I modded every PC I had back then to use blue LED's for the power and HDD activity ect. Now, however I can't stand the things and anything that comes with one as standard now gets modded back to the old colours of red, green or yellow lol. I modded my modern Corsair case to have a green/red power LED and a yellow HDD LED.
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Super
Forgot to say that at first mister Nakamura was granted $100 bonus for the breakthrough. After 10 years later Nakamura went in court against his company for not giving him any money for the blue LED that as literally changed the face of the Earth.
He won in court but asked only the half of the money. $500 000 000. Because asking for the $1billion would have destroyed his former company.
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Forgot to say that at first mister Nakamura was granted $100 bonus for the breakthrough. After 10 years later Nakamura went in court against his company for not giving him any money for the blue LED that as literally changed the face of the Earth.
He won in court but asked only the half of the money. $500 000 000. Because asking for the $1billion would have destroyed his former company.
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Vermilicious
Ah yes, I remember. When they eventually did become available to anyone, they were pretty expensive. I still have the first ones I ever saw and tried somewhere, part of a small project that was never finished. Certainly, it's nice to have the full spectrum available, but that blue LED light has always felt kind of unnatural to me, and ironically, too bright.
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Ah yes, I remember. When they eventually did become available to anyone, they were pretty expensive. I still have the first ones I ever saw and tried somewhere, part of a small project that was never finished. Certainly, it's nice to have the full spectrum available, but that blue LED light has always felt kind of unnatural to me, and ironically, too bright.
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Breanna
One of my cousins on my dad-s side helped develop Blu-Ray technology and told me about it a couple years before it went public. I was actually sworn to secrecy, even having to sign a non-disclosure agreement, preventing me from mentioning the new technology until it was released to the public. I couldn-t even say the word Blu-Ray without worries of being sued.
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One of my cousins on my dad-s side helped develop Blu-Ray technology and told me about it a couple years before it went public. I was actually sworn to secrecy, even having to sign a non-disclosure agreement, preventing me from mentioning the new technology until it was released to the public. I couldn-t even say the word Blu-Ray without worries of being sued.
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