Advantages and Disadvantages of LED (2024)

Advantages

• Efficiency: LEDs emit more lumens per watt than incandescent light bulbs.The efficiency of LED lighting fixtures is not affected by shape and size, unlike fluorescent light bulbs or tubes.
• Color: LEDs can emit light of an intended color without using any color filters as traditional lighting methods need. This is more efficient and can lower initial costs.
• Size: LEDs can be very small (smaller than 2mm2) and are easily attached to printed circuit boards.
• On/Off time: LEDs light up very quickly. A typical red indicator LED will achieve full brightness in under a microsecond.LEDs used in communications devices can have even faster response times.
• Cycling: LEDs are ideal for uses subject to frequent on-off cycling, unlike incandescent and fluorescent lamps that fail faster when cycled often, or high-intensity discharge lamps (HID lamps) that require a long time before restarting.
• Dimming: LEDs can very easily be dimmed either by pulse-width modulation or lowering the forward current.This pulse-width modulation is why LED lights, particularly headlights on cars, when viewed on camera or by some people, appear to be flashing or flickering. This is a type ofstroboscopic effect.
• Cool light: In contrast to most light sources, LEDs radiate very little heat in the form of IR that can cause damage to sensitive objects or fabrics. Wasted energy is dispersed as heat through the base of the LED.
• Slow failure: LEDs mostly fail by dimming over time, rather than the abrupt failure of incandescent bulbs.
• Lifetime: LEDs can have a relatively long useful life. One report estimates 35,000 to 50,000 hours of useful life, though time to complete failure may be longer.Fluorescent tubes typically are rated at about 10,000 to 15,000 hours, depending partly on the conditions of use, and incandescent light bulbs at 1,000 to 2,000 hours. Several DOE demonstrations have shown that reduced maintenance costs from this extended lifetime, rather than energy savings, is the primary factor in determining the payback period for an LED product.
• Shock resistance: LEDs, being solid-state components, are difficult to damage with external shock, unlike fluorescent and incandescent bulbs, which are fragile.
• Focus: The solid package of the LED can be designed to focus its light. Incandescent and fluorescent sources often require an external reflector to collect light and direct it in a usable manner. For larger LED packages total internal reflection (TIR) lenses are often used to the same effect. However, when large quantities of light are needed many light sources are usually deployed, which are difficult to focus or collimate towards the same target.

Disadvantages

• High initial price: LEDs are currently more expensive (price per lumen) on an initial capital cost basis, than most conventional lighting technologies. As of 2012, the cost per thousand lumens (kilolumen) was about $6. The price was expected to reach $2/kilolumen by 2013.At least one manufacturer claims to have reached $1 per kilolumen as of March 2014.The additional expense partially stems from the relatively low lumen output and the drive circuitry and power supplies needed.
• Temperature dependence: LED performance largely depends on the ambient temperature of the operating environment– or "thermal management" properties. Over-driving an LED in high ambient temperatures may result in overheating the LED package, eventually leading to device failure. An adequate heat sink is needed to maintain long life. This is especially important in automotive, medical, and military uses where devices must operate over a wide range of temperatures, which require low failure rates. Toshiba has produced LEDs with an operating temperature range of -40 to 100°C, which suits the LEDs for both indoor and outdoor use in applications such as lamps, ceiling lighting, street lights, and floodlights.
• Voltage sensitivity: LEDs must be supplied with the voltage above the threshold and a current below the rating. Current and lifetime change greatly with a small change in applied voltage. They thus require a current-regulated supply (usually just a series resistor for indicator LEDs).
• Light quality: Most cool-white LEDs have spectra that differ significantly from a black body radiator like the sun or an incandescent light. The spike at 460nm and dip at 500nm can cause the color of objects to be perceived differently under cool-white LED illumination than sunlight or incandescent sources, due to metamerism,red surfaces being rendered particularly badly by typical phosphor-based cool-white LEDs. However, the color-rendering properties of common fluorescent lamps are often inferior to what is now available in state-of-art white LEDs.
• Area light source: Single LEDs do not approximate a point source of light giving a spherical light distribution, but rather a lambertiandistribution. So LEDs are difficult to apply to uses needing a spherical light field; however, different fields of light can be manipulated by the application of different optics or "lenses". LEDs cannot provide divergence below a few degrees. In contrast, lasers can emit beams with divergences of 0.2 degrees or less.
• Electrical polarity: Unlike incandescent light bulbs, which illuminate regardless of the electrical polarity, LEDs will only light with correct electrical polarity. To automatically match source polarity to LED devices, rectifiers can be used.
• Blue hazard: There is a concern that blue LEDs and cool-white LEDs are now capable of exceeding safe limits of the so-called blue-light hazard as defined in eye safety specifications such as ANSI/IESNA RP-27.1–05: Recommended Practice for Photobiological Safety for Lamp and Lamp Systems.
• Blue pollution: Because cool-white LEDs with high color temperature emit proportionally more blue light than conventional outdoor light sources such as high-pressure sodium vapor lamps, the strong wavelength dependence of Rayleigh scattering means that cool-white LEDs can cause more light pollution than other light sources. The International Dark-Sky Association discourages using white light sources with correlated color temperature above 3,000 K.
• Efficiency droop: The efficiency of LEDs decreases as the electric current increases. Heating also increases with higher currents which compromises the lifetime of the LED. These effects put practical limits on the current through an LED in high power applications.
• Impact on insects: LEDs are much more attractive to insects than sodium-vapor lights, so much so that there has been speculative concern about the possibility of disruption to food webs.
• Use in winter conditions: Since they do not give off much heat in comparison to traditional electrical lights, LED lights used for traffic control can have snow obscuring them, leading to accidents.