Originally Posted by Merriwether
You, yourself, are talking about a 1w LED at the outset, but then you say that the *brightest* LED you can find has a maximum power rating of .12W.
1 Watt is for a Luxeon, as in the EL500. 0.12 Watt is for a superbright LED as in the EL200. Apparently you don't understand the difference between them.
Originally Posted by Merriwether
When halogen and LED draw power at a time equally, and are equally *powered*, at a level sufficient to light the halogen bulb usefully, LED don't outlast halogen by very much, and the halogen light puts out significantly more light per unit of power than the LED.
This statement is the only other one worth commenting on. It is almost true, but I believe it is exaggerated. A 4W LED and a 4W halogen should drain the battery at the same rate, but I doubt the difference in light output would be very large. However, care would have to be taken to make sure both lights are really using the same amount of power, and still operating near optimum specs. Trying to invent such a comparison using the 1W EL500 or the even lower power EL200 creates a lot of room for error. However for those of us who want "1 Watt" lights or "10 Watt" lights, a 4 Watt example would be pointless. A more interesting comparison for me would be a 1 Watt LED vs. a 1 Watt halogen - a careful measurement or calculation rather than some hand-waving nonsense based on dubious manufacturer numbers printed on a box or some website. I would be surprised if there was much difference in brightness for the same power consumption.
I have no interest in 5 and 10 Watt LEDs. 5 and 10 Watt LEDs would suffer from the EXACT same problem that 5 and 10 Watt halogens suffer from - draining the batteries too fast. I have a 1 Watt LED for a reason - because it provides plenty of light and has a long runtime. Any light that consumes more power/Watts would provide more light than I need, and not run as long, so a brighter light would be LESS useful for me. IF I had wanted a "5 Watt" light I would have bought one. I wanted a 1 Watt light. It could have been a 1 Watt halogen light, for all I care, though I was willing to pay a premium for the Luxeon. In the end this isn't about LED/halogen/HID - it's about an optimum level of power consumption for the task at hand. I doubt that a 1 Watt halogen could be so much brighter than a 1 Watt LED that it would have changed my decision. (If it even is at all...)
Interestingly, I see Performance is FINALLY stocking the EL500.