Friday, March 19, 2010

Incandescent No More?

At least, incandescent light bulbs will be no more for the Toshiba company who has been manufacturing these bulbs for 120 years.  They are now streamlining their production with more efficient, low energy bulbs as the demands for them increase.  The production of incandescent bulbs last year at Toshiba was half of what they produced in CFLs (compact fluorescent lights).  With many international governments restricting the use of incandescent bulbs, Toshiba is most likely the first of many manufacturers to start phasing out these less efficient lighting.  Here is an article which gives more details.

My only hope is that we go farther in our lighting technology to emulate the wonderful light an incandescent gives off in a more efficient way.  It's getting better, but there's nothing I'm excited to use as a great substitute.  LEDs (light emitting diode) and other low voltage lights usually give clean looking light but are weaker.  I love to use natural lighting as much as possible but obviously, you will have to turn on a light at some point in the evening or on a cloudy day. Lighting can affect greatly how color is cast in a space so this topic is very important to my line of work.

I thought this t-shirt design my husband found for me from threadless.com would shed some humor on the subject: It's a lightsaver!

Images from google images and threadless

1 comment:

Sarah said...

Great post as I took a lighting class last year and I agree, the LED is bright and clean. I bought the 'twisty' bulb last year and hated the light it gave off - it was ghastly! I took it out immediately. Natural light is the best (if possible!).

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