Why led lighting?     

Lasts Longer Than Any Other Light Source Greater Than 10 Years in Many Applications

These solid state devices have no moving parts, no fragile glass environments, no mercury, no toxic gasses, and no filament. There is nothing to break, rupture, shatter, leak, or contaminate. Unlike typical conventional light sources, LEDs are not subject to sudden failure or burnout.
There is no point in time at which the light source ceases to function; instead, LEDs gradually degrade in performance over time. The higher quality products, for example, are predicted to still deliver an average of 70% of initial intensity after 100,000 hours of operation.
In an application where the light source would be used for 24 hours per day, 365 days per year, this would result in a system lifetime of over 11 years with only a 30% degradation (70% lumen maintenance) from initial luminous output and no catastrophic failures.

Reduced Maintenance Costs

Since LED based light sources last at least 10 times longer than a normal light source, there is no need to replace the light source, reducing or even eliminating ongoing maintenance costs and periodic re-lamping expenses. Many regulated and critical lighting applications
Such as buoys, beacon lights, emergency exit lighting, back up lighting, and security lighting require scheduled, periodic, bulb replacement. Unlike other sources that fail as a burnout at the end of their useful life, LEDs will degrade gradually. This means that there is no need for standby or emergency call in personnel to change a light source in safety critical applications.
Light emitting diodes provide even greater advantages in applications where location makes replacement difficult. Radio towers, offshore marine buoys, aircraft warning lights, and bridge and tunnel lights all require expensive maintenance fees due to their prohibitive location. Eliminating or dramatically reducing the frequency of required maintenance can save thousands of pounds per maintenance call in these applications.
The long life of a solid state solution also allows for trouble free designs. For example, even with the temperature extremes, high shock and vibration environment of trucks and cars, automotive LED based designs offer life of vehicle performance. This provides enhanced design freedom, as no provisions for accessibility and replacement need to be considered in the system design.

More Energy Efficient Be the Environmental Solution

LED light sources are more efficient than incandescent and most halogen light sources. White LEDs today can deliver more than 40 lumens per Watt, and are predicted to achieve greater than 80 lumens per Watt by 2009
When viewing solid state lighting as an alternative, it is important to consider the total system level benefits. For example, due to the decrease in energy used for the lighting of a building, air handling costs drop, generating both additional initial and ongoing investment savings. Additional benefits such as the directionality of light for general lighting and vivid true colors without the need for filters in signaling applications add to the energy efficiency on a system level.

Design Flexibility and Unobtrusive Hidden Light

LEDs are typically much smaller than conventional light sources, allowing for dramatically different lighting designs capitalizing on the unobtrusiveness of the source. Designing with LEDs can enable completely hidden sources of light, eliminating large visual luminaries, and creating a magical effect when illuminated. Light emitting diodes provide the lighting designer with additional options and choices compared to conventional technologies. Instead of taking one very bright source and mounting it in a reflector optic to distribute light, LEDs can enable alternative lighting concepts where the light source can be divided into multiple points of light, distributed across a surface, or placed in multiple planes. LED technology allows for complex three dimensional lighting solutions. The flexibility of LEDs allows for new, playful, and innovative lighting solutions, allowing for never before possible designs.

Vivid Saturated Colors Without Filters

Light Emitting Diodes require no filters to create colored light, resulting in deeper saturated colors without wasted light. Deep reds, greens, blues and other colors can be produced in monochromatic form directly form the solid state element. Many lighting applications, such as signs, signals, and warning lights, are colored. Usually this light is created through filtering a broad band white light to the desired hue. These filters block the undesirable portions of the white light and let only the desired wavelengths through. The blocked light that is not of the correct color is therefore lost energy.
Therefore, to make a red sign, one can use a monochromatic LED that generates only red light. There is no need for expensive filters, and there is no wasted energy. A 12W red array, utilizing up to date Led technology, can fully replace a 150W bulb used in red traffic signals, resulting in dramatic power savings due to the higher efficiency of colored light generation.

Directed Light for Increased System Efficiency

The light emitted from an LED is directional. Typical conventional sources such as incandescent, halogen, or fluorescent lights are omni directional, emitting light in all directions. In order to direct the light onto the object to be illuminated, light that is not directed toward the desired location must be redirected using secondary optics or reflectors. Each time a light beam is reflected it looses some of its intensity, resulting in a fixture loss. Typical fixture losses range from 40 to 60%, meaning that in some cases less than half of the light generated by the source is directed in the desired direction. The directed nature of LEDs can result in fixture efficiencies of 80 to 90%, requiring less total lumens to provide the same level of luminance. When considering LEDs as a light source it is important to consider all factors in determining the appropriate solution. For example, if you are replacing a 500_lumen source in a fixture with 50% efficiency with an LED based source in a fixture with 85% efficiency, less than 300 lumens will be required from the LED source for an equivalent luminance. A side benefit from the directionality of light emitted from the LED solution is the reduction of light pollution.

Robust, Vibration Proof, Solid State Lighting

Light emitting diodes are solid state devices containing no moving parts and no filaments to break. As such, LEDs handle rough environments including heavy vibration and impact, no fragile glass, no mercury, no toxic gasses. There is nothing to break, rupture, shatter, leak, or contaminate. The solid state nature of LEDs
make them extremely rugged and durable—an excellent choice for applications where reliability and dependability are paramount.

Dynamic Color Control, White-Point Tunable

LEDs can offer intense deep reds, greens, and blues for dynamic color changing applications. With fast turn on times (measured in microseconds) it is easy to instantly change from one hue to another. The endless choices of color are available for almost any application, wall up lighters, pools and fountains, applications at work or in the home environment, with unlimited color selection capability.
As white light is the combination of red, green, and blue (RGB), you can easily create any color of white from warm to cool blue by changing the relative intensity of each color component. LEDs switch on and off so quickly and have an exceptional dimming range, all
Without compromising Color Rendering Index (CRI) or, more importantly, Color Acceptance Index (CAI). Recent studies show improving CAI dramatically increases consumer acceptance of merchandise packaging. Unlike other conventional lighting technologies, with LEDs CAI (and CRI) is not intensity dependent.
The use of an LED based lighting system enables a wide color gamut of saturated static and dynamic lighting effects. Whether the desired effect is a tunable white source or a single light capable of digitally producing any color under the rainbow, LEDs offer a new dimension to the lighting world.

Fully Dimmable Without Color Variation

Light emitting diodes are fully dimmable with straightforward driver topologies. For example, Luxion power light sources can be dimmed by over 1000 times without sacrificing any characteristic of the light. This dimmability, through the common technique of pulse width modulation (PWM) of the drive current, allows for environmentally friendly illumination without sacrificing either the Color Acceptance Index (CAI) or the Color Rendering Index (CRI). With PWM control, the color provided is independent of the set intensity. Therefore it is easy to optimize the desired color and then adjust the intensity to suit the needs of virtually any application.

Instant On, Full Color, 100% Light

Light emitting diodes have turn on times measured in microseconds. The instant on feature of LEDs provides additional reaction time in safety critical applications. There is no flickering or warm up period as the source reaches ignition temperature in an LED lighting system and the emitted wavelength is reached instantaneously. The fast turn on times allow for rapid switching systems enabling an instant change from one hue to another in a dynamic color changing RGB based lighting system.

No Mercury in the Light Source

Unlike most fluorescent sources, LEDs contains no Mercury. Eliminating Mercury from your lighting system will enable specifiers to meet new and future increasingly stringent environmental regulations.

No Heat or UV in the Light Beam

Conventional light sources (as well as some LEDs) contain invisible radiation as well as the visible component of light in the beam. This radiation can be very short wavelength blue, known as ultraviolet light, or long wavelength red, known as infrared, which causes heat.
Ultraviolet light can, and will, damage materials, cause color changes and eventually breakdown many materials. Museums and other applications where ultraviolet light is a liability use expensive low flexibility light pipes to filter out this harmful component of the generated light. Frequently the light sources used for these light pipes are a very bright, hot, incandescent or halogen sources, generating most of their light as heat. Infrared light can damage displayed objects, increases air conditioning costs, decreases environmental comfort, and when reflected off reading surfaces increases eyestrain. The leading and most efficient LED products only generate light in the range that a person can see. There are no ultraviolet rays or infrared radiation contained in the light beams of these products. Eliminating these harmful and non useful components of the spectrum results in a light beam that will not degrade illuminated objects while providing a cool beam with a light source that is safe to touch.

Cold Start Capable

Many light sources in use today are not well suited to cold environments. In some cases, such as walk in refrigerators, cool outdoor climates, or automotive applications expensive drivers are required to enable ignition at low temperatures. LEDs do not require any special equipment or drivers, to deal with low temperature environments. Cold start is not a problem for this solid state technology, down to 40°C. This cold start ability allows for instant on/off control without specially designed circuitry, simplifying your system design while lowering the cost of the electronic driver.

Domestic usage

LED lamps are becoming available in standard domestic fittings such as MR16 and MR11 halogen type formats. Cost and efficiency from different manufacturers vary widely.
A 1.2 watt white LED light cluster is as bright as a 20-watt incandescent lamp (bright enough to read by).
The lighting quality is comparable to that of cool white compact fluorescent lamps, with color rendering indices near 85. The significant advantage in this application would be that the LED lights don't flicker and the light is very directional in small arrays. LED strip lights can be installed under counters, in hallways, and in staircases. Concentrated arrays can be used for room lighting. Waterproof, outdoor fixtures are available, and they operate in temperatures from -20°C to 80°C. Manufacturers consider applications such as gardens, walkways, and decorative fixtures to be the most cost-efficient. LED lights have a further advantage over fluorescent in rooms with TV or radio because they do not generate radio frequency interference as some compact fluorescent lamps can.