Philips has designed its new 40-Watt LED lightbulb to resemble a traditional incandescent bulb, while saving significant energy and lasting up to 25,000 hours.
Traditional incandescent bulbs continue to be phased out, but many continue to argue that they prefer their light to that of LEDs. By producing a bulb that looks the same, produces the same kind of light, but uses an LED rather than a traditional filament, Philips hopes to win consumer holdouts over to the energy-superior alternative.
Philips’ clear LED bulb sports an innovative lens for a sparkling, filament-like light effect. The bulb is 85 percent more efficient than a traditional incandescent bulb, with a 6W input wattage: 78 lumen per watt ratio. The high-quality light, with 470 lumens output, stays as clear and bright as a 40W bulb, even when it is dimmed, Philips says.
“With our L-prize LED bulb we showed that we could match the quality of incandescent light. With our clear LED bulb we’ve combined the aesthetic beauty and shape of the traditional incandescent with the benefits of LED,” says René van Schooten, CEO Light Sources & Electronics for Philips Lighting. “Using our innovations in LED the bulb is highly energy-efficient, saving up to €10 per bulb per year compared to traditional bulbs.”
The clear LED 40W replacement bulb is available starting July 2014 for US$12.
Philips also recently unveiled Hue Lux — the first smart white-light LED bulb with perfect dimming controlled from the app on your mobile, and the newest addition to Philips'Hue family of personal wireless lighting solutions.
In January, Philips introduced a new InstantFit LED T8 that reduces the cost for facility managers replacing fluorescent tube lighting with energy-efficient LED technology, known as LED tube lamps (TLEDs). Philips asserted that if all current fluorescent lighting was replaced by TLED lamps, it could result in savings of over $55 billion in energy costs — the equivalent of energy generated by 210 medium-sized power plants.
Philips, along with Unilever, 3M and several other members of the European Alliance to Save Energy (EU-ASE) recently signed a letter sent to the European Commission calling for a new set of competitiveness objectives to exploit all possible cost-effective energy-efficiency opportunities by 2030.