A little while back, one of these appeared for sale on Ebay for a fairly high price. I was very tempted, but it actually ended up selling for quite a bit more than the opening bid. Not so long ago, a second one was listed by the same seller. Apparently he has/had quite a few of these lanterns available, new and unused. Thanks to a recent spot of overtime, I had some spare cash and thought "why not, looks quite interesting". Thankfully, this time around, the bid remained at the opening amount. Expensive, yes, but significantly less than buying one from Philips, and I have a great deal of interest in this new technology so felt it was worth it.


Please click me....


bulbmuseum.net/ledminiridium.htm
(please excuse the grotty mobile phone photos, it was all done after-hours at work)

Really must cobble together an index page for all these write-ups, at least as a temporary measure while I try and sort out the rest of the site.

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The photo seems okay to me Chris!

Have you wired it up yet to see how effective it is in terms of optical performance?

An interesting addition, even if it was pricey. You could have the future in your hands there.

Iridium, future, hopefully not, but sadly inevitable.

Interesting write up there Chris. The comparison with the SGS252 just goes to show how big and bloated even the small Iridium is - one of the reasons I dislike it....

The LED module does seem well designed and I wonder if the use of an aluminium rather than GRP canopy is also aimed to dissipate heat more effectively from the module?

As with other LED lanterns, the use of LEDS only really means in theory a longer lasting light source - power consumption is comparable to conventional lanterns. This will remain so until LED efficiency can be raised by at least 30-50%. This may well not be achievable with junction LEDS due to the heat dissipation and may have to wait for OLED technology to mature further.

It looks good to me and I can see this rivalling the Stella.

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From streetlighting to radio, dance through the night whilst the streetlights are glowing outside.

Have you wired it up yet to see how effective it is in terms of optical performance?

Yep - take a look further down the page, there are some shots showing the dimming feature, and a few shining along the floor trying to show the bright side-beams and colour variation. Seems very effective to me, if not startlingly bright, but I havn`t yet been able to compare with something more common to see how it fares. I`d like to set it up side by side with a Beta Five, if time and space permits, should be a good test given the widespread use of the B5 around the country. The collection (and me) will be on the move at some point, hopefully not so long away, will hopefully have plenty of room before too long.

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There are some quite exciting developments in current LED technologies by Cree in particular, pushing the efficiency of white diodes to some 160 lumens per watt, which will be available soon. I`d like to think other manufacturers have made similar progress, but Cree in particular seem to be leading the way just now, announcing efficiency jumps fairly regularly it would seem. I don`t know where OLED technology is right now, but it shows great promise. The large surface-area of current designs I have seen should go a long way toward dealing with thermal issues if they retain that general design, although I do wonder how optical performance will be handled? Perfect indoors, coat the whole ceiling for diffuse and shadow-free natural-looking light, but not so helpful outside. Will we go back to "projected area optical control" and lanterns resembling the original Atlas Beta Two perhaps?

The future? Perhaps, but I do see this and other LED lanterns just now (I do have another, larger one from a couple of years ago that is believed to have been a one-off prototype or very limited run) more as transitional designs leading toward the future. It`s why I find them so interesting, and crazy high prices aside, am interested in adding more to the collection if possible. They are perhaps like the first mercury and sodium designs, interesting early beginnings and worth preserving.

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Ah yes, my bad, I forgot to click on the image! Yes that does look bright!

Quite an interesting lantern there! At least it's mopre compact, but any Iridium is a no-no for me.  

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"I used to rule the world... Now I sweep the streets I used to own."
Remembering GEC.

Interesting. The price is out of my league at the moment, but still an interesting piece nontheless.

How do you get it to dim? are you simply feeding a DC current from an outside supply into the red and black 1-10vdc inputs? As I have 9 600x600 box lights that run two 36w PL-L lamps and have phillips performer dimmable ballasts in them. They also have an integrated PIR and light level sensor in them, and will dim the lights down if the room is already well lit - but I'd like to try out manual dimming control without paying out for a dedicated 1-10vdc dimmer switch!

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The 1-10 volt dimming input was just hooked to a variable bench power supply. I wasn`t entirely sure what it would do, but the moment I connected the wires, the light went out. Suspect it can sense when a control input is connected - there is an incandescent indicator lamp hooked across the PSU output as a visual check that it`s on (and turned up high enough) so the driver could have sensed the resistance of the cold filament before I turned the DC output on. Didn`t light again until it was turned up to around 1 volt. Upon disconnection, it went back to full power.

It shouldn`t be all that hard to construct a simple variable voltage controller based around an LM317 3-terminal regulator. Just make sure to limit the output to 10 volts, I don`t know how over-voltage-protected those inputs are.

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