Teardown of an LED bulb that cost all of $1.25! The end point in cheap A shaped bulb design I suspect. More details on my blog electronupdate... Follow me on twitter: / electronupdate1
Lots of people do light bulb circuit investigations, but you are the only youtuber who that goes that one step further and looks at the guts of the components themselves! Excellent work.
I've just released my own comparison of Adrian Black's dollar store lamp and a UK Poundland one. Interestingly, above about 5W they switch from capacitive droppers to the current regulator chips. I nice feature is that running the lamp heats its aluminium PCB up enough to easily desolder (After you've turned the lamp off!) and replace the sense resistor with a higher value to run the lamp at a much lower power.
Your breakdowns are amazingly complete. The only thing that I'd like to have known is if the light flickers and, if it does, what frequency. Is it 60 Hz, 120 Hz or some other frequency. (You mentioned at 3:20 about a chopper frequency.) That wold be useful if video was being recorded. Thanks for a great channel.
I happen to have a few of these bulbs and quite surprisingly I can confirm they do not flicker, I have a phone that can record 960fps video: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-27QV_ndAt5g.html Here's an example of one that does flicker: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-Ppk5qBSTQjg.html
@@vant4888 Are you asking me? I don't have an oscilloscope, so I can't do any comprehensive testing what I can say however is that if it does flicker then it's at such a high rate even 960fps isn't picking it up and would therefore be well beyond a what a normal camera would pick up. Also, bear in mind that I bought these bulbs between 6-12 months ago, and they could've changed at anytime.
I love the engineering optimization of LED bulbs. My first cost about $50 and now they are pennies. One day I plan on putting all of my first generation LED bulbs in a museum.
Standard incandescent bulbs radiated most of the energy down. Only modern halogen and old fridge lightbulbs had vertical filaments. Which one is better depends on the application. Radiation to the sides generally serves a decorative purpose where the light is mostly absorbed by the lampshade, and you can look at the open bulb straight from below without it blinding you.
If you think about it, its so amazing how low the prices of LED bulbs have gotten. That LED lamp at that price? Before 2010 an LED bulb cost over 60 dollars. I was an early adopter and splurged 35 bucks for the Philips L Prize winning light bulb back in 2012. It runs continuously from 5:00 AM to 9:00 PM 98% of the time. And its way more complex than this one. Thanks to you, I wanted to see its innards of it and it has very blue LED's producing the light but when the light goes through the strange yellow covering it becomes a nice warm light. We got a second Philips LED bulb a little later with the same idea and it failed in less than 2 years using it only at night as a porch light.
@@guspaz Not really though. The complicated cooling systems are a thing of the past. Even smart bulbs have the same basic "snow cone" design. Old bulbs had intricate heat sinks and cooling systems.
The early LED bulbs, from Philips were very expensive but are still going strong despite daily use. Installed them early 2014, only one of nine bulbs failed till date. I subsequently got the cheaper and lighter ones in 2017 which did not last till 2019. They died in about a year. Something changed at Philips from 2014 till 2017 that the bulbs started failing. Talking of bulbs, my B22 Halogens in A shape are going strong beyond the 2000 hours rated life. Speaks volumes about halogen technology. They are the Philips too..
How are your crees doing? Both the old glass bulb and cheaper plastic one with less chips driven harder with less warranty failed quickly for me. Cree is looking or already has spun off leds to focus on more profitable power silicon nitride devices.
@@anullhandle The Cree 60W bulbs I bought back when they were a new thing are all still going strong. The ones I bought after they stopped production off bezos's empire from a sketchy reseller (possibly counter fit) have had some failures. I have some other late but authentic 40W first gen design bulbs that I got from homedespot and the failure rate from them has been high as well but not horrible. The new design cree bulbs that are just up firing are the worst. Keep in mind I am using them all indoors in open fixtures. The worst location for any of them is in my bathroom where humidity can get high but the failures I am seeing are not just in that space and the bulbs I use there are all the 40W variety.
@@anullhandle perhaps the most interesting is that the failures are not random. Some locations fail most often. So the middle bathroom fixture (row of 3) kills bulbs as does the right (but not left) socket in our dining room. If anyone can explain the dining room thing please post your hypothesis.
It was noticeable to a camera (banding on the video) which is a sure sign of flicker. I don't think these bulbs are targeted to customers who are particular on light quality.
not oled. oled will always be more inefficient. Laser diodes will be the next step for general lighting. Gain extraction can be much higher and light output per unit volume can go MUCH higher than LEDs with no high current droop effect.
@@eduardoanonimo3031 relevant search terms are "sld laser" "laser based illumination" "laser based lighting" "irradiance" and "etendue". All current systems use phosphor emitters to destroy the phase coherence of the laser. Further future systems may use more sophisticated methods such as supercontinuum generation in a photonic fiber from ultrashort pulses.
