Apparently those exist, and they have the benefit of eliminating the below-par teal (blueish green) reproduction of cool white LEDs. Those often have a bit of a gap between the pump diode direct radiation, and the YAG phosphor emission. And of course no blue emission above 440nm.

Has anyone ever seen this technology in real life? I attempted to buy some from Aliexpress - wide range LEDS supposedly putting out the whole 340-800nm spectrum. Of course i was sceptical and i don't expect much from 10 leds for €3,29 shipped to the Netherlands, but i do wonder if there are actual reliable sources, and if this technology is already in use somewhere.

What i received were bog standard plant grow leds with the 450nm pump diode and a red phosphor centered around 650nm.

GE did 405nm pumped high CRI white LEDs very very long ago under the trademark Vio LED. Probably forgotten now. 2009 story...

Violet and UVA pumped WLEDs would of course lose in efficiency to classic WLEDs considerably due to extra Stokes shift and extra conversion in blue light.

Indeed GE's VioLED is the only one I am aware of which became commercially successful, for a short time.  There was another company in Mexico that briefly produced A-line retrofit incandescent lamps with the same technology of a remote phosphor coated glass bulb around UVA LED emitters around 2012-2015, but they also quickly disappeared, and I forget the name.  UV-pumped technology is considerably better in terms of colour quality and colour stability, but has the penalty of higher cost and lower efficacy.  During the mid-2000s LEDs were developed with a view to achieving much greater performance than is commonplace today, until manufacturers realised that actually selling price and energy efficacy are the only things most consumers care about, and many of the innovations aimed at better quality of light had to be abandoned.

Aah damnit.
Near zero chance to find them to add to the collection, i guess. Even 'plain' remote phosphor ones are hard to find locally.

By now UV and near UV leds have gotten pretty common so i guess it should be possible to see if production would be economically possible these days - if the efficiency would be acceptable.

It would be fun to experiment with remote phosphor stuff as a hobbyist, but so far i haven't come across vendors of the right phosphors in hobbyist amounts.

E: found this: https://img.archilovers.com/blog/3648_01.pdf
A CRI of 70 and 85 isn't that great in today's context. But i know for certain (i have some 2003...2009 LED lamps) the 80 cri common warm white-ish LEDs are absolutely ugly so they could definitely have been better than what was on the consumer market at that point in time.

Either way, i'd like to add somethng like this to my collection of oddball or historically significant LEDs. Same goes for the pre-Nichia era blue LEDs.

UVA sensitive phosphors are easy to get from Aliexpress. Most of long afterglow inorganic stuff will work with UVA and for DIY remote phosphor even organic phosphors are OK. Probably you even can pick some at local art stores. Fluorescein and rhodamine solutions look fun with UVA and blue light too! There is also some new bright organic phosphor stuff like pyranine.

Found something!

https://www.ledrise.eu/led-strips-modules/our-profesional-led-strips/led-strip-linearz-sunlike-cri97-2700-lm-m.html

Now to find a place where you can actually buy them EDIT they literally sell them on that site, and they ship from germany. Cooooool. Probably gonna order a bunch of these.
Wouldn't call 405nm UVA but at least it's a different strategy than the standard 450nm leds.

I also found the raw led phosphor powders on aliexpress (just one vendor, and exclusively yellow, green and red) but that stuff is EXPENSIVE. Jesus christ. Think 100 euro for 10g of each powder. Standard nail polish fluorescent pigment is of course cheap as dirt.

These Toshiba look to me like a mixture of UVA and standard blue pumped LEDs (you can clearly see both peaks in the spectrum), my guess either alternating UV/blue components on the stripe, or each of them being actually a two or three die component, with one (or more) UV and one (or more) blue in the package.


And for the powder cost: 10g is in fact quite a HUGE amount of things like active phosphor dye, for normal DIY project you will need way less than a gram per project, unless you are doing something really big.
What makes these things expensive is the handling cost: These things tend to get very messy very quickly when spilled (you can not clean them out of anything it touches and it is the heck visible there), even when assuming they aren't toxic (beside being fine powder), so needs to be handled very carefuly. And that adds quite a lot of labor time to handle each individual package, regardless how much material is in it (if 10g cost 100Euro because of this, a 100g package would cost no more than 20 Euro; but for a DIY when 10g is a lot, 100g quantity becomes really useless).

Looks more like violet 405nm pumped white LEDs.

Actually these Seoul Semiconductor Sunlike LEDs are still blue pumped.  But they add a second violet chip to fill in the shorter wavelength part of the spectrum normally present in sunlight and traditional lamps which is missing in most LEDs.  The result is a big improvement in metamerism index and a crisper light that causes tge same degree of fluorescence from illuminated materials as present in other light sources.  There is some slight stimulation of the phosphors by the violet chips in addition to the blue.

Correct, not UV pumped. But it is another way to get the entire visible spectrum.

I've ordered some of the Toshiba/Seoul LED strips and chips from Aliexpress. A huge gamble (at best aliexpress semiconductors are a 50/50 gamble real/fake), however there are people on the internet who have claimed they are the real deal. They weren't cheap. The vendor supplies the spectrograms with the advertisement which is hopeful.

I'll post the spectrum pictures here once i receive them in 2 weeks or so. If they are legit, i'll post the links. Cost was 20 euro for a 120 led strip (iirc i bought the 2700 + 5500k one so you can mix your own color temperature), and 2x 4,50 for 20 2700k and 20 4000k SMD LEDs you could theoretically solder into any random ice cream cone LED lamp.