WHAT ABOUT THE OLD SCHOOL BULBS?

Perfect? That’s a pretty big claim, but is it true? I’m kind of old fashion so I love all of the old school incandescent and halogen bulbs. After all they emit beautiful full spectrum light that ranks right up there with sunlight. While the light these old bulbs emit is hard to beat, both incandescent and halogen do have a couple of fairly serious flaws that keep them from being perfect.

First of all, incandescent and halogen technologies are both energy hogs. Most of the electrical energy going into these old bulbs is turned into heat instead of light. Yes, the light they emit is very much like the sun and so is the heat they put off … ouch! Secondly, they just don’t last that long so get ready to change them out every few months. If you have a store full of the older lightbulbs, you already know that spending time up on a ladder changing bulbs seems like an everyday job! 

WE ALL AGREE Florescent CFL’S ARE AWFUL!

If you have tried switching to compact florescent bulbs for more energy efficiency and longer bulb life it was a step in the right direction but let’s face it …. The light CFL’s put out really sucks AND you can’t dim them AND they are full of mercury and therefore must be recycled. Hardly perfect.

WHAT MAKES SORAA LEDs SO MUCH BETTER THAN THE OTHER BRANDS?

The race to make an LED for general lighting both energy efficient and useful has been going on for years. One company, Soraa, has pulled WAY ahead of the pack. That means Polar Ray believes that Soraa is better than Phillips, Cree and GE just to name a few major brands! So here is the Soraa story and why Polar-Ray.com believes they make the perfect LED lightbulb. 

Perfect LED light at Soraa begins with perfect LED crystals. The Nobel prize winning physicist and co-founder of Soraa, Professor Shuji Nakamura (together with his colleges at UC Santa Barbara) developed a totally unique Light Emitting Diode crystal called GaN on GaN. Instead of mounting GaN layers on inferior foreign substrates like sapphire or silicon carbide as is the industry standard, Professor Nakamura perfected a way to create a perfect crystalline structure with 1000x fewer distortions than conventional LEDs by mounting GaN on Gan. This unique LED crystal emits a violet color light instead of a blue color light like the other technologies. The violet color interacting together with Soraa’s special blend of 3 phosphors yields a full spectrum light with no gaps in the red or cyan. It’s like no other LED light source, uniquely giving people a visual experience they had not imagined possible with LEDs. The newest Soraa Vivid Color Technology renders total color accuracy that is most comparable to natural sunlight. As an added benefit the perfect crystal structures of Soraa’s GaN on Gan give out 5x more light per unit area. The color spectrum of the Soraa perfect LED crystal also provides all of the fluorescent excitation needed to discriminate clearly between subtle shades of white which is important when illuminating everything from clothing, appliances or even a person’s smile. The bottom line with Soraa LEDs is that you get both beautiful light AND energy efficiency.

LET’S TURN THIS NEW LED TECHNOGY INTO A LIGHT BULB!

Ok, so we have a super duper new LED light source that glows in the lab, but that is not a bulb and we all need something that fits into our lamps and fixtures! Bring on the optical engineers. 

Soraa takes their perfect LED crystals and packages them with superior electronics into a variety of light bulb packages that range from small MR16’s on up to PAR 38 size bulbs. Their super bright GaN on GaN LED crystal allows for the placement of this light source right in the center of the LED bulb package instead of scattered LEDs behind the lens. Soraa calls this center positioning “Point Source Optics”. This center positioning when combined with Soraa’s folded prism reflective optics allows them to offer perfectly controlled beam angles from super narrow 4 degrees up to a wide 60 degrees beam spreads providing sharp single shadows and tight uniform form factors as good as halogen or better! 

CAN SORAA’S UNIQUE LED TECHNOLOGY BE MEASURED AND QUANTIFIED AS SUPERIOR?

There are two ways the lighting industry currently measures how accurately an LED light replicates color. The first is a 1 to 100 scale called the CRI (Color Rendering Index) wherein the higher the score the better. So far so good, but new research suggests that CRI values may not be giving us the whole story when applied to LEDs because the CRI scale largely ignores the strong reds which are prevalent in skin tones, art work, clothing and food products. The measurement for the deep reds is called R9 value. Once again a score of 100 is perfect but when it comes to deep reds some light sources are so bad they score less than 0. The US Dept. of Energy’s “Energy Star” rating sets a minimum standard as acceptable if an LED bulb has a CRI of more than 80 and a R9 score of more than 0. Frankly that’s a fairly low bar to hit but hey it’s the Dept. of Energy not the Dept. of Quality! The DOE primarily wants us to start using more energy efficient bulbs. Frankly, if the DOE cared at all about quality of light they would never have pushed CFLs on us so aggressively! Lighting experts seem to agree that a high quality LED light should have a CRI greater than 90 and a R9 score of 50 or better. Soraa’s generation three Vivid Color Technology has a CRI of 95 and an R9 of 95. That’s the highest color rendering score in the industry. When these color rendering attributes are combined with Soraa’s bright whites and crisp shadowing we believe that Soraa’s latest generation is arguably as good a light or better than a Halogen or incandescent while using 90% less energy.