[Available again! - BLF special edition light] new Sofirn AAA twisty high CRI 5mm LED

[iamlucky13]

@Phlogiston

@patmurris

Sorry if this has been discussed before, but aren’t there more modern and efficient alternatives to those ‘old school’ leds - COB for instance?

Actually, there’s not much in it. The Yuji LED puts out about 6lm at 20mA and about 3V. That’s about 100lm/W, so efficiency is OK.

Output is low compared to a similarly-sized COB, but this is meant to be a last-resort light, so there’s a tradeoff: lower output for more runtime.

The 5mm LED also has the significant advantage of being completely encapsulated in all directions, which helps with robustness - another desirable characteristic of a last-resort light. The shape of the package even gives it a built-in lens.

That’s close to the worst case specified performance. Best case is 2.7V and 8 lm at 20mA, which would be 148 lm/W.

Considering this is a 95+ CRI emitter, anywhere in that range is pretty decent, and the high end is good enough to be hard for me to believe. When djozz tested an 80+ CRI Nichia 219C, his numbers at the closest datapoint to the rated current worked out to 139 lm/W.