LED Optics

[SkiFletch]

Since we have a few people with more experience than me here, I thought I'd ask a planning for the future question. When I bought my LED's for my hood project, I bought extras, cause well, accidents happen. After burning through some of my extras recently, I'm left wondering, what do I do if I run out of extras? The obvious answer is to just buy some new LED's, twiddle with my dimming, and be happy. But I notice that LED's are a lot like cell phones or computers. They're being developed and declared obsolete at a really fast rate. Furthermore, just like all tronics, the faster/newer/better they get, the smaller they get. Which finally leads me to my question: Will I have to buy new optics every time I upgrade LEDs? Does the LED lens have to fit nice and snugly into the optic lens to actually focus properly, or is it more the angle of incidence of the sides of the optic itself that do the actual focusing? Optics is such a hard field...

 

[bassplaya12]

the optics are like a dollar each. you may just have to buy them

 

[Willistein]

It depends if the LED package gets smaller. A lot of companies stick with a package size for a while. The optics are really not that precision so as long as the LED has a similar angle of spread and the optic fits over it, it should work fine. We're talking plastic lenses here.

 

[SkiFletch]

We're talking plastic lenses here.

Good point...

 

[der_wille_zur_macht]

It depends if the LED package gets smaller. A lot of companies stick with a package size for a while. The optics are really not that precision so as long as the LED has a similar angle of spread and the optic fits over it, it should work fine. We're talking plastic lenses here.

All this.

Look at Cree, for instance. For the most part, their LEDs for the last 2+ years have been the same "XP" package size - XP-E, XP-G, XT-E are all interchangeable as far as optics are concerned, with very little variance in beam width. (Notable exception: XM-L).

Even if you did switch to something non-compatible, you can usually get by anyways. In fact, some people are fitting "wrong" optics on purpose for various reasons, and/or modifying optics to alter beam width (cutting down the holders or shimming them up to get a narrower/wider beam).

Ironically, recycling optics probably makes more sense than it seems on face value. As LED technology gets better, your dollar buys more and more capability with each new generation. However, with optics, the price/performance ratio is pretty much fixed, so there's no real performance incentive to buy new optics, and thanks to improvements in the LEDs themselves, you basically get diminishing returns on optics if you keep buying them new.

 

[SkiFletch]

Sweet, that saves me a decent amount of cash when economies of scale are taken into account. I realize they're only a buck a piece, but when your LED count rises, so does that buck