Will these stop us all .....

[GMM]

..whinging about cfls?

will they turn out to be completely useless when/if they ever appear on the market? ;-)

[GMM]

Oops - just posted that then found an earlier thread on the same story. Sorry chaps!

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

Don't know why, but on both links I'm getting a 404.

[Dave Liquorice]

Works for me, perhaps you need to force a page reload to flush and caches.

[Bill Wright]

You can't believe a word that Matt McGrath writes. He's a fanatical greeny, like many at the Biased BBC.

Bill

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

Scrubbed BBC cookies, flushed caches and still a 404. Oddly all the other BBC pages work fine.

[Richard]

Lights on, no one home?

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

Found it - it was just an press release teh BBC had printed without verifying it, so probably pulled it for a while. It wasn't just me, Germans and others couldn't get it.

[Brian Gaff]

Actually one of the problems these days is that people don't question the dumbed down science news they get. I mean if I had a tenner for every 'blind man sees, soon to be available to all' type headlines, I'd be rich. The truth of many of these tends to be less spectacular!

Brian

[The Natural Philosopher]

I've actually seen OLED panels making a sort of blue-white light.

IIRC they ran at about 6-9V. Lifetime was the issue. Efficiency was good and the light source was pleasantly large.

Ideal for room lighting.

I suspect this one may actually run. There should be little problem in making a bulb shaped one either.

[robgraham]

days is that people don't question the

The fact that the 'inventor' has had one running for 10 years made me wonder a bit - if the idea was effective then why has it taken so long to develop it further?

[Dave Liquorice]

Well the Psion 5 had an electroluminescent backlight, that came out in

1997, 15 years ago. But that was a bluey/green and not very bright.

Look at LEDs they have been in production since 1968 (good grief!) but it's only fairly recently that they have become available as half decent room light sources.

[Andy Burns]

IIRC the EL sheet has a half-life of about 2,000 hours.

I think the LCD screen on my DAB radio uses EL back-lighting, when it was new, I found it too bright on its dimmest setting, now I find it too dim on its brightest!

[The Natural Philosopher]

is that people don't question the

well the big dream in the case of the company I was briefly involved in was three colour OLED screens.

They ran out of money trying to get three colors and make them last long enough and have enough efficiency.

If they had, as I suggested, tried to make some novelty light bulbs they might still be in business.

there are a lot of materials that work, but do they work well enough and are they cheap enough to produce en masse?