Super Efficient Plasma Lightbulb Burns Brighter Than A Streetlight

Silicon Valley's Luxim has developed a lightbulb the size of a Tic Tac that gives off as much light as a streetlight. CNET News.com's Michael Kanellos talks to the company about its technology and its plans to expand into various markets. - cnet

6000º Kelvin. That's the temperature at the surface of the Sun. It's also the temperature inside the new hyper efficient plasma lightbulb from Luxim, which puts out 140 lumens per watt. That's double the efficiency of an LED and almost ten times better than an incandescent bulb.

Video here.

The little pod sits inside a ring of "dielectric material", which concentrates an electrical field into the bulb. The contents of the bulb vaporize and the plasma glows. A single of these tiny bulbs is brighter than a streetlight.

Back to that temperature. 6000 K is close to the color temperature of daylight (5500K), so the Luxim bulb doesn't suffer from a "cold" light like some energy saving solutions. Right now Luxim is pushing its tech at the entertainment industries: projectors and light displays. As costs fall, though, this could end up everywhere, except perhaps a mood-lit bachelor pad.