I see what you were talking about now, this image with the “rotated parabolic reflector”
“The parabolic reflecting collar is made by rotating the parabolic curve around the axis which goes through the focus and is parallel to the directrix. The resulting reflector is round with a parabolic surface. Light emitted from the LED placed at the focus is reflected from one side of the parabolic surface, becomes a parallel beam, incidence onto the opposite parabolic surface, and refocused back to the LED itself. One major difference between this parabolic recycling collar and the spherical recycling collar as shown in FIG. 1 is that the light emitted from a point at and near the focus will be reflected by the parabolic reflector twice and back to the same point where the light is emitted. With this property, with used with packages with multiple LEDs and multiple colors, each LED will be able to perform recycling of its own light independently and each LED with its own color will be able to improve the brightness independent of the other LEDs and colors.
[0009]
The parabolic reflecting collar is positioned such that higher angle light rays are reflected twice, off opposing wall reflecting portions, back to their point of origin. Preferably the light source is an array of multiple LEDs having different colors and sizes.”
So the thing is that it doesn’t actually work. The lines are not reflected back to the point of origin as descibred in the patent. Would be cool if it did, but nope. It would need to be a different shape than a parabola, and then it would still only work from light rays originating from the center, not any point on an LED. ![](https://i.imgur.com/n6a2bSZ.png)