livescience.com — The main light source of the future will almost surely not be a bulb. It might be a table, a wall, or even a fork. An accidental discovery announced this week has taken LED lighting to a new level, suggesting it could soon offer a cheaper, longer-lasting alternative to the traditional light bulb...
Oct 22, 2005 View in Crawl 4
livewiredOct 22, 2005
A friend of mine was working on a research project all summer with these "quantum dots". If I remember right, he said it was very expensive.
eric_s_smithOct 22, 2005
They appear to claim that the energy efficiency is twice that of traditional, tungsten-filament incandescent bulbs. That means that fluorescent, including compact fluorescent, still wins.
vertigoblueOct 22, 2005
yeah, well my inova x5 LED flashlight is awesome...so, there! :P (its brighter than my 2 C Maglight) LEDs can give off a good amount of light, with the right technology
tomeeOct 22, 2005
This article doesn't get the point. The students accidentally discovered that these particular quantum dots, which happen to be fairly easy to produce, give off a nice white color, instead of blue. They did this by shining a laser to it, but are hopeful that they can do without a light source at all, just by applying electricity to it directly. That is the point, and that doesn't seem to been mentioned at all in the article.
pureeviljesterOct 22, 2005
Seeing as how LEDs won't be cheap when they come out. Might as well stick with lightbulbs.
z0rzOct 23, 2005
I always loved LED technology. Anything to save me a buck or two. Plus they take years and years to burn out. Pretty funny that this was an accidently discovery.z0rz<a class="user" href="http://z0rz.com/blog">http://z0rz.com/blog</a>Featuring the $150 PC
mehereJun 30, 2006
I was just using google to find sites on LED light bulbs and actually got this link to digg before the link to the original article! Man digg is kickin' butt and takin' names
mehereJun 30, 2006
If you read the link Scott_T posted you'll find out the quantum dot crystals are made of Selenium and Cadmium. I don't know if I want massive quantities of small crystaline heavy metal dust particles dust particles in my light bulbs