Welcome to the LEDs Magazine News & Insights newsletter for Mar. 10, 2021. We are a bit more than halfway through the Sapphire Awards nomination process. So get to work on those entries. I am receiving questions daily about one aspect or another of the nomination and entry process. I don’t mind the email exchange. But the questions have made it clear that we haven’t explained everything quite so well.
So I took the time to post to our blog with some brief explanations and guidelines. The top Illumineer of the Year award is not a lifetime achievement award, although perhaps we should add such an award. Illumineer is intended to recognize a person or small team that did something really innovative in the time period of the awards entries.
Also, the Sapphire Design Excellence Awards are new this year and presented in partnership with the Lighting Controls Association (LCA). But entrants do not have to be LCA members to enter. They simply need an installed project that made innovative use of controls.
And so long as we are talking about ourselves and not industry news, there is something else new rolling out from us perhaps later today or in the next couple of days for sure. Our March issue will deploy digitally just as all of our issues do. Subscribers get seamless access to the current issue and all archives. Starting with this issue, however, we have a greatly enhanced experience for subscribers that want to peruse a full issue on a mobile platform. We have added progressive technology to the deployment. You can still scroll through the issue — horizontally page by page. But when you select an article to read, you will get a single-column display that is large enough to read and that you can scroll through vertically.
As for news, our Mark Halper continues to mine the ams and Osram situation. Osram has a new CEO and has also redesigned its website to more accurately reflect its increased focus on photonics. We expect to see some notable divestitures soon.
Meanwhile, automotive is one sector in which Osram intends to remain strong. Still, an announcement from the Osram Continental joint venture a couple of weeks back was curious for the information that was not supplied. The partners have what looks like an interesting LED headlamp light engine that could make LED-based headlamps affordable for all autos in a manufacturers’ lineup. But the partners said last September that they would be disbanding the joint venture and relative to the new announcement did not say how that breakup might impact this new light engine.
Tomorrow/Thursday we will present our newest webcast. It’s the first in a series of germicidal UV-C presentations. Driver manufacturer Mean Well will detail the specific requirements for drivers of UV-C LEDs and how such designs differ from visible light systems. A couple of weeks later on Mar. 23, long-time LED sector researcher Mike Krames will do a deep dive on advancements in UV-C LEDs in terms of performance, lifetime, and cost. Mike tells me that UV-C LEDs are usurping legacy sources faster than many have predicted in disinfection applications.
You will find many more stories of interest in the body of today’s newsletter. And always feel free to contact me to discuss content we post or to pitch a contributed article.
- Maury Wright, (858) 748-6785, [email protected]