Anyone else thinking...
...an array of these could make a rather nice Real HD™ display for your laptop/phone/tablet/phablet/whatever?
A consortium of UK universities have banded together to spend some government cash building very small LEDs with a view to creating broadcast networks capable of hitting 1Gbps. The team, led by the University of Strathclyde and taking contributions from research units at Cambridge, Edinburgh, Oxford and St Andrews, plans to …
Um, no it didn't. "You could make a whacking great telly from these" I thought completely missed the point. Hence my comment!
Why bother using them in big, low res, view from half way across the room, mains powered, TVs? These should be thin, light, superbly efficient, backlight free (did I mention thin & efficient), with incredibly fine resolution, beautiful colour purity, viewing angles, etc... all making them PERFECT for small high-performance, battery powered, portable devices. The "compact-system-camera" and mirrorless-SLR designers are desperate for something like this. Apple Inc probably can't wait to "invent" them for the iPhone 26. ...but tellies? Meh.
"And by making each LED a subtly different colour, they can all transmit separate data streams, which means 1,000 of them packed into a square millimetre can outperform existing techniques a million times over."
Given that current LED's are not monochromatic, I think someone's being a bit optimistic there.
To answer Norm DePlume, yes you could make proper white LED's by putting lots of small differently coloured LED chips in a single package.
<RANT>
Donkeys years ago there was an article in new scientist about the invention of the gallium nitride blue LED. They mentioned that it would be possible to combine the blue with orange light to make a white LED. I thought at the time that whilst it may appear white to look at directly, the colour rendering of such a beast would be terrible. Unfortunately that's pretty much what the manufacturers did. Now we have bright LED torches that are hard to see by, stupid flashing bike lights that cause loads of glare because of the blue content, and now the world is filling up with cars with over-bright daylight running lights! I fucking hate it all!
</RANT>
...and now the world is filling up with cars with over-bright daylight running lights!
Cars have a problem all of their own. The rules around lighting were defined in the mid '70s and stipulate the maximum wattage of the lights used.
Thus we have ended up in a situation where HID and LED lamps capable of figuratively boiling your eyeballs in their sockets are perfectly legal, while swapping your conventional 55/65w dip/main Halogen bulbs for a set of 70/100w ones isn't on a vehicle manufactured after 1976. Even though they're not as bright as the newer, more efficient, technologies operating at legal wattages.
There is a small sop to common sense in that HIDs are obliged to be self-levelling. Unfortunately, as roads tend not to be as smooth as a baby's bum and self-levelling systems are reactive and take a few moments to adjust, all this actually does is swap "continuous dazzle" for "photographic flashgun".