Reaching the 100lm/W is not limited to laboratory anymore, but it is a figure for chips rated for 1W at 80degC on the LED package thermal interface (so the pad intended to provide thermal contact with the heatsink; the brand makers already stopped rating their products at 25degC...). It is around the 90..100lm/W range for CRI of 85 and above, up to 120lm/W when CRI 60..70 is enough. With 90% ballast efficiency you are at 80..90lm/W for CRI 80+ and 100..110lm/W for CRI 60..70.

That really threaten the fluorescents and all HID's, just when the LED cost become pushed down...

The development progressed quite a lot over the past few years...
Of course that is not achievable with the E27 srew-in retrofits format (where the equivalent interface operate at 120..130degC), but within a well designed lantern (with the heatsink, alias metal body, at about 10..15degC above the ambient) it is not as difficult to achieve.

LED is 100 Lm/W in real world streetlights

Vu1's ESL lamp was produced in small quantities in 2011 and 2012 but I was never able to get my hands on one. I've been reading the Lowes.com comments, and most people liked the lamps but some experienced early failures. The company moved their production to China so they could mass produce the bulbs, and it's been more than a year and they still aren't ready. The company's stock lost most of its money and for quite some time, the company wasn't communicating well with their investors. Maybe by summer, they will actually get this product into production. I'll buy one for the collection value, but I don't think this technology has a chance, especially now that they took so long to launch the product and LEDs are coming down in price.

The R30 bulb is supposed to retail for about $16. The lamps do appear to have a hot cathode and a power supply with capacitors (from the tiny photos that I've seen) and they take about one or two seconds to come to full brightness.

@medved, what if there are new lamp developments in technologies that would beat LEDs in efficiency in 5-10 years or so?

at 25 lm/w these are stillborn.
nothing but a curiosity.

@medved, what if there are new lamp developments in technologies that would beat LEDs in efficiency in 5-10 years or so?

There is not much room to go anymore, no light source could be a "perpetual motion". The hypothetical 100% efficient white light source would have ~300lm/W (exact figure depend on the color rendering and CCT), while the LED's are already attacking 120lm/W and approaching the 150lm/W in the lab conditions, what mean energy efficiency around 30% become quite common, approaching the 50% mark. And there is no known hypothetical limit to really approach the 100% efficiency mark (unlike the discharges, where some energy is emitted in wavelenghts outside the visible range, or require phosphors which have the ultimate efficiency given by the ratio of the output versus input photon energy).
So the classical concept of blue LED with a phosphor may ultimately lead to ~75% energy efficiency (assume 100% efficient blue LED and 100% quantum phosphor efficiency, more can not be attained), while LED's are already at the ~35% mark, so half of the hypothetical maximum.

On top of that the wafer style technology allow to make quite complex and technologically demanding structures in penny cost per piece in high volume. And that would be nearly impossible to beat, as the new light source would be for sure even more complex and technologically demanding than the LED (the evolution went that way all the time).

from what I understand LEDs will have a problem with a few applications such as compact high brightness sources etc. street lights etc are big and flat that's why they can utilize LEDs better than compact high brightness sources.

Quote from: Silverliner on March 04, 2013, 07:00:28 PM

@medved, what if there are new lamp developments in technologies that would beat LEDs in efficiency in 5-10 years or so?

There is not much room to go anymore, no light source could be a "perpetual motion". The hypothetical 100% efficient white light source would have ~300lm/W (exact figure depend on the color rendering and CCT), while the LED's are already attacking 120lm/W and approaching the 150lm/W in the lab conditions, what mean energy efficiency around 30% become quite common, approaching the 50% mark. And there is no known hypothetical limit to really approach the 100% efficiency mark (unlike the discharges, where some energy is emitted in wavelenghts outside the visible range, or require phosphors which have the ultimate efficiency given by the ratio of the output versus input photon energy).
So the classical concept of blue LED with a phosphor may ultimately lead to ~75% energy efficiency (assume 100% efficient blue LED and 100% quantum phosphor efficiency, more can not be attained), while LED's are already at the ~35% mark, so half of the hypothetical maximum.

On top of that the wafer style technology allow to make quite complex and technologically demanding structures in penny cost per piece in high volume. And that would be nearly impossible to beat, as the new light source would be for sure even more complex and technologically demanding than the LED (the evolution went that way all the time).

from what I understand LEDs will have a problem with a few applications such as compact high brightness sources etc. street lights etc are big and flat that's why they can utilize LEDs better than compact high brightness sources.

The reasoning I made was made mainly for general lighting.
Yes, the LED's would have problems when fitted into some existing systems, where today are used the high intensity sources (HID, halogen). But i guess the evolution would go the other way around: These systems would be completely redesigned around the LED's, so e.g. present microscope illumination using HID focused to feed thelight with rather low overal eficiency into an optical fiber to illuminate the sample, would use the LED directly illuminating the sample without the separate light engine box and the optical fiber and so on.

And if really sharp focus would be needed, I guess the industry would use laser diodes (the coherent light allow to focus with rather high optical efficiency even with small size optics), but that is already happening today (optical disc drives,...)...