It may be in sight. LEDs have come a long way, baby.

My wife and I were talking about this the other night, with the same conclusion. Of course, the big advancement needs to be in making LEDs bright enough to replace automobile headlights.

Unless they fill the room with am-bient light the way incandescents do, they can forget it. If there's one thing I absolutely hate, it's a little pool of light surrounded by darkness.

[Please note "am-bient" should not have a hyphen, but the comments box rejected the word (minus the "t") without the hyphen as "questionable content." Weird.]

I can't wait. I mostly use compact fluorescents, and have since they came out.

Incandescent bulbs are like vinyl LPs: even when they were the only option, I hated them.

I got one of the new hi-watt LEDs (Luxeon) for a scuba diving light. It's vastly superior to my old halogen in terms of light output, and so far the batteries have lasted over 100 hours...over ten times as long as they did with the halogen.

Nearly every light is fluorescent here.

I bought an LED flashlight, it's supposed to operate for 40 hours before the batteries need replaced.

LED traffic lights and pedestrian signals are already part way to entirely replacing conventional lights in my city. I wouldn't be surprised to see the street lights start being replaced soon.

Thank you, Nakamura!

One of things it sited was that expense of the system. If your handy with a soldering iron one can peice together a system by themselves for fairly cheap like this guy Whats cool is that he got LM317 3-Terminal, voltage regulators as a free sample from Texas Instruments.

Street and pedestrian lights are optimal uses for LEDs because a) their duty cycle is continuous, and b) they have minimum viewing angles.

The same goes for tail lights and brake lights in cars.

As Barbara noted, until LEDs can produce ample wide-angle light, they'll never be able to reliably replace incandescents, and with the need to use arrays of RGB to create white, you'll end up with "hot-spots" of color and funky-colored shadows.

The huge Citgo sign in Boston's Kenmore Square (behind Fenway Park) was just completely overhauled, replacing the original neon with an LED lighting system. It looks great and is expected to require less maintenance than the neon tubes, which were beaten to bits every winter. Cutting the power consumption didn't hurt either.

Funny how an oil company sign is a beloved local landmark, considering how saturated with wacky leftoids this area is - it is a Venezuelan company now, so I guess that makes it O.K.

The State of Texas is well on its way to eliminating incandescent traffic lights. They're so rare now that they're starting to be the ones that look strange.

When replacing a bulb means three Public Servant$, a bucket lift, and stopping traffic for a while the cost of the lamp itself is well-nigh irrelevant. 10x life comes to very close to 1/10 total operating cost, and the (relatively small) difference in power usage eventually covers the cost of the replacement, even at a couple hundred bucks per lamp.

Next frontier: airport runway and taxiway lighting. Talk about costly when they fail... but FAA's regs are specific-item regs, not performance requirements. If it ain't got a filament, it don't meet spec.

Regards,
Ric