Types de LED

Common LEDs

These are used in most appliances, either as an infrared emitter or receiver, or as light pilots. They are currently used for road signs, such as traffic lights, achieving the energy savings desired by public administrations.

SMD LED

This is an LED encapsulated in a semi-rigid resin and assembled superficially. This offers certain interesting features for the world of lighting:

A) Its encasing allows a large semiconducting surface, which provides a large amount of light improving the quality of the LED.

B) One way to install them is to place them in series on a printed circuit (surface mount or SMD) to create a luminaire or bulb. Although some of these LEDS may be damaged, they have a device that supplements them so that the others continue to function at full capacity.

C) They allow for a wide variety of colours, depending on the semiconducting material used to manufacture them. The RGB model uses three LEDS with primary colours and can create up to 16 million colours through additive mixing. The user can select the desired colour by remote control or controller, raise or lower the light intensity and create incredible lighting effects.

D) The colour rendering index (CRI) is high, up to 80%. This means that it reproduces colours faithfully.

E) The do not have a filament therefore are resistant to shocks and it is really complicated for them to break down. The estimated lifetime of an SMD LED is around 50,000 hours, or , almost 6 years running 24 hours a day.

F) They do not generate hear.

G) Using proper optics, we can concentrate the LED to make the light more intense or expand it to illuminate more surface. The more the beam is opened the less intense the light will be.

H) The name of the SMD LED is usually accompanied by the enclosure measurements. Therefore, the most standardised (in terms of lighting) are the SMD 3528 and the SMD 5050.

COB LED

COB LED corresponds to the acronym ""Chip on board"", in which many LEDs have been inserted in the same enclosure.

This type of LED is gradually being introduced into the market above the SMD. The main reason for this is it provides better light performance: this means that with the same power and size, the COB LED provides more light than the SMD. This gives the COB LED certain advantages:

A) By providing more light, the beam does not need to be so concentrated in order to achieve intensity. Therefore, there are many products with this type of LED that emit a beam with an angle of up to 160º.

B) The COB LED has a higher CRI (colour rendering index) than the SMD, therefore creates a higher quality light. In most cases, the CRI is greater than 90."