Is there any difference in the light emitted from an LED and light emitted from a light bulb?
In: Physics
In general yes. But there is not just one type of LED. In general an LED emits one frequency of light depending on the exact crystal used in its manufacturing. It is quite common to combine three different types of LEDs, Red, Green and Blue to simulate any color. However as the color is really just a combination of three frequencies of light instead of all frequencies of light that a light bulb or the sun will give you it will not look the same. It works fine for screens but for lighting a room where most of the light is reflected off different surfaces it can look really bad. For example an orange would look very red as it does not reflect the specific frequencies of green and blue.
But there is a way around this issue. You can have fluorecent LEDs. These have an ultraviolet LED light source covered in a material that converts that ultraviolet light into broad spectrum white light. These again come in two different variations, cold and warm white. They have a slightly different peak color output but are both broad spectrum. By combining these two types you can change the “color” of the light to match the desired temperature of the room. You are not able to match the exact color output from a traditional light bulb but you can get it close enough that your eyes are unable to tell the difference.
It really depends on the lightbulb and led. Technically yes there is a difference.
The visible light for humans is between the wavelength of 380nm to 780nm (380nm ultraviolet, 780nm infrared). Everything between ranging from blue to red.
A normal household lightbulb doesn’t emit all the wavelengths equally, but with a focus towards one colour (see how the light indoors is mostly warm / orange)
An LED doesnt cover the exact same spectrum the normal lightbulb does. Maybe this graph can illustrate it better
[Spectrum of Light ](https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/350528/how-could-i-measure-the-colour-spectrum-of-a-light-bulb-and-investigate-how-clos)
A regular light bulb makes light by making stuff red hot, this produces a lot of heat in the form of invisible infrared light, quite a bit of red and yellow light, and then a little bit less green light and then it follows the rainbow gradually falling off, creating white light but quite “warm”
Leds on the other end only produce blue light, so we use a phosphor that turn that glows and fills in the space between the red and blue in the rainbow, creating white light when it’s combined with the blue of the LED, creating a much “colder” light (there also are warm leds which just add more red so it balances out the blue more)
A regular light bulbs creates a better light, closer to that of the sun, because after all, they are both very hot things glowing from heat, but they also produce that invisible infrared light, which is wasted because we can’t see it, this is why leds use less power and create more light, and even then the difference the is pretty much unnoticeable to the human eye, and leds are getting way better, so it’s more than worth it to use LEDs
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