I work in this industry and as of right now LED lighting is making amazing advances in just the last 3 or 4 years.
There are now parking lot lights that produce as much light as a 175 watt metal halide bulb for around 40 watts. Not only that the LED's are rated to last around 10 maybe 20 years. Average life of a MH is about 4 years. Furthermore the MH lamp looses nearly 60 percent of its rated output in the first couple of hundred hours. The led's lose about 8% over their lifetime.
As to 'color' it is mostly a matter of perception. LED's can (these days) produce some of the whitest light out there. People feel comfortable with the incandescent light with its shift to the red end of the spectrum. It makes your skin look better and veils flaws. LED's white/blue end of the spectrum makes those flaws stand out just like sunlight does. Furthermore people have become accustomed to 'warm' spectrum bulbs.
If you have a fluroescent lamp in your kitchen and want to try an experiment go out and buy some high CRI (color rendering index) 5,000K lamps and put them in. You will think to yourself "My gawd I dident realize this kitchen was this dirty" and it will also seem alot brighter... and I mean alot for the same wattage. Be warned though these lamps cost as much as three times the average warm white fluorescent lamp.
Not a week goes by when a factory rep. doesent frequent my office to showcase the latest LED lighting products. It truely is amazing how much has been done in the last few years.
Now there is a down side as with all these sorts of things. The base element Gallenium Arsinide (sp?) is already becomming hard to get and as you can tell from the name it is closely related to arsinic, a toxic poision. Now your not going to get poisened from a led lamp unless you crack it open (no easy task) and eat it. But when you start to get millions of them out there it could become a problem as to what to do with them when they do fail or just get thrown out. They are still a far sight better than the compact fluroescents and other HID type lamps which can release mercury or worse mercury vapor when broken.
Anyhow if you have any questions about LED lighting or just lighting in general feel free to ask. My consulting fees will be waved (for now) :rotfl:
Oh forgot to add that the lighting systems mentioned in the original post is not really new and has been around for several years under the name of RF excitation lighting. They have some serious problems for one they emit radiation in the RF spectrum which 'could' be a cancer generating source, also there inital cost is astronomical. Ill look for some links on the subject.
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freea...rnumber=999612
http://ecmweb.com/mag/electric_rf_lighting_tunes/
http://www.arrl.org/tis/info/rflamp.html
pps; You might want to delete the duplicate posts... makes you look like a noob
