Bulb-makers making softer, warmer LED
The antique-style lamps that are fast becoming a design necessity for retro bars, hip restaurants and chic homes from New York to London are helping to save the Earth - and keep people buying.
The old-fashioned bulbs, which look like the inefficient incandescent technology patented by Thomas Edison in 1878, could encourage people to change their light bulbs more than once a decade, even as the world moves to greener lamps.
By rearranging LED chips onto a strip inside the bulb instead of in a clump, bulb makers found they can satisfy the innate human desire for warmer, natural light, which the first generation of LED bulbs failed to offer.
"People are looking for that sparkle and the cozy and warm effect that you see in incandescent bulbs," said Kristof Vermeersch, head of global product management of LED spots at Philips Lighting NV.
Shifting fashions in lighting could help drive sales of LED bulbs that would otherwise need to be replaced every 10 to 15 years, because they're so much more efficient than incandescent bulbs that need to be replaced a few times a year.
"The real problem of LED lighting is that the bulbs last for ages, so they don't have these replacement cycles where the market just carries on making money," said Tom Rowlands-Rees, an analyst at Bloomberg New Energy Finance. Now the industry has found a way to make people pay more for lighting because it's cool, "not because they need it," he said.
When filament LED technology was first demonstrated, by Japanese company Ushio Inc. in 2008, it wasn't an immediate hit. Sales started to take off in the past two years, however, as the design was improved, prices fell and larger manufacturers from Philips to GE Lighting started making them, too.
"When LED first came out, it looked like alien material," said Justin Wang, chief executive officer of AXP Technology Inc., the California company that introduced filament LED in the U.S. "But when filament LED came out, it looked like a familiar incandescent bulb."
Just four years ago, the market for filament LED was tiny, and mainly focused in a few northern European countries. Now shipments are growing rapidly, and the market could be valued at $20 billion globally by 2020, calculated Wang, using LEDinside and TrendForce Corp. shipment and pricing forecasts.
It's still difficult for consumers to tell the difference between an incandescent bulb and a filament LED, and manufacturers like GE say they need to do more to promote the benefits of this growing market.
"LED has been a tricky sell because you have to teach consumers and retailers about the technology," said Matt Sommers, consumer innovation manager at GE Lighting. "We can't just assume that they can look at it and know what it is."