About LED's

The LED, or Light Emitting Diode is going to be the future for all forms of lighting. Why is this? Well the LED is a solid state device with no moving parts, no filament to burn out, and above all they consume a tiny amount of current when compared to an incandescent light bulb. When properly constructed, they can last for up to 100,000 hours.

On this page I want to give you some information about our products, in particular the LED light source. There is a lot of information on the internet regarding LED's, and the different types that are used.

Basically as far as emergency vehicle lighting is concerned, three types of LED are available. These comprise the so-called generations. In a nutshell they are Generation 1 (5mm LED), Generation 2 (Super-flux LED), and Generation 3 (1 watt LED). So what is the difference?

Generation 1

When LED emergency warning lights first started appearing back in the mid nineties there was only one type of LED available and that was the standard 5mm basic diode. These were manufactured in various colours and light intensity. These LED's were very small, and although bright you needed a lot of them to make into a light head. The other problem is that these LED's were "highly directional" typically having a viewing angle of some 10-20 degrees. This meant that they were very bright at the front but had no output "off axis". These became known as generation 1, and some manufactures still use them today.

Generation 2

These LED's came along with the advent of the "Super-flux" LED. These were different from generation 1 in that they had four wires instead of two which made them more robust. They could also be driven with more current and so some of them were brighter. They also had marginally more off axis output due to thier wider viewing angle.

Generation 3

This is a completely different type of LED altogether. These diodes are surface mounted onto a circuit board and coupled with an optical lens system to produce the brightest light available. Unfortunately these LED's also generate a lot of heat and so have to be mounted on a heat sink to keep the from overheating.

These LED's are available from 1/2 watt up to 20 watts. The most common used in a lightbar is from 1 to 3 watt diodes. The viewing angle from these diodes is extremely wide, and therefore some sort of focusing device has to be used. There are several types of light module using these LED's, but the two main types use either a collimating lens to concentrate the light beam, and then a diffuser lens to give better of axis light output. The second type is called a linear lighthead. This type of unit has the LED's mounted on a circuit board/heat sink and uses a lens to focus the light beam onto an linear type reflector. This design gives the most off axis light output, and this is what Redtronic make thier products from.

Quality

There are numerous companies in the marketplace selling these components, many come from the far east. There is a great deal of difference in quality between the best and the worst LED's available today. Only a handful of companies produce the highest quality product. Redtronic only use the highest quality LED's manufactured by Osram in thier light bars and light heads.

It is worth noting that a lot of product (copies or so called knock offs of other manufactures designs) coming onto the market from China and the far east use the cheapest quality LED's. These are not as bright, or as well made as the quality products that we offer. As these imports are not type approved, they are illegal to fit to your vehicle if you intend to use them on the road.