The price is actually amazing.

That price looks about right. The high power LED bulbs that we’ve seen run around this price as well. I think that people are willing to buy less expensive bulbs at the moment that don’t put out as much light so the solution is to start selling bulbs that are less expensive - either using cluster LED’s or fewer High Power LED’s.

The downside with longer lasting bulbs is that we will start to see products that come with bulbs that are non-replaceable.

I still look forwards to future versions of this technology which will be much lower in cost and probably energy usage as well. That has to be good for all of us.

The rising costs of energy are actually driving us more to find lower energy solutions, just one more reason to be green.

I love what’s coming down the pipe for solid state and LED lighting technology.  Start ups are doing some interesting things too, and less “lab product” and more commercialized product as they’re aspiring to be venture backed.  One of the crazier comments I’ve heard about regarding alternative lighting efficiency was in Cringley’s column on the financial crisis - http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2008/pulpit_20080926_005422.html.  His plan for solving it, banning incandescent bulbs.  And the scary part is that he’s probably only half kidding.

This is definitely an industry to watch.

Oh and by the way, the USA and Canada have already banned incandescents, starting in 2012.

The price will come down, but even at $100 and $150 the LED lamps are far cheaper than incandescent and comparable to $2 compact fluorescent bulbs. At 15 cents/kWh, over the life of an LED bulb, 50,000 to 100,000 hours, at 50,000 hours you need to buy 50 incandescents or 10 CFLs, and your total cost for the incandescents is $475 for 50 cent 60 watt bulbs and $775 for 100 watt bulbs vs. $158.50 and $240 for 50,000 hour LEDs and $117.50 and $230 for $2 5,000 hour CFLs that are using 13 watts and 28 watts. At 100,000 hours lifetime for the LEDs they are cheaper than both of them, $217 and $330 for the LEDs vs. $235 and $460 for the CFLs, and you don’t want to know for the incandescents ($950 and $1,550), five times as much as LEDs.

$0.50 for incandescents and $2 for CFLs are mature prices; when they first came out each was much higher, so with mass production we can expect the LEDs as well to drop in price, probably to under $10 each, possibly to less than $1 (hint: there will be a big market at $29/bulb). Since there is no vacuum manufacturing is simpler and the bulbs are much more durable.

Chris…cites us the bill, precious!  (The incandecent ban one, please.)  Your LED lifetime figures seem a bit bluesky-ish, esp. for retrofit mounted lamps in hot or insolated places; then there’s the matter of the IR heat being useful, in bath applications.

That’s great that the Physics Boat is coming in for Toshiba (else they’d need 14W for 850lumens, not 7.8) but I distinctly ordered 4 Design Boats too, and it’s just been dorking with 1W Luxeon chips on new fixtures for industry so far.  Get it on, you Design Japan people!

That’s nice of you to say $100 is an okay price (where are the 14W Philips/Luxeon bulbs that were supposed to make it to the US at $70?) but that’s generally taking 7 years to meet ROI; in the kitchen, where steel pans somehow need replacement that fast, that’s not cutting it even if they -do- retrofit in a nice closed globe without thermal failure (something incandecents didn’t have, so to speak.)
    Oh, I should’ve gone to the epitaxy magnet high school…