Post by Peter JasonFor the chandeliers to sparkle each light has to
have a small and bright point of light, such as
halogens have.
Can the LED luminaires do this?
I presume you are referring to a cut glass droplet style
chandelier here where the light emerges through the droplets.
One of the problems for LED lighting in many cases is the sources
are tiny and painfully bright, requiring diffusers (which are
lossy and drop efficiency). However, in this case, the small
sources are an advantage, so look for lamps which don't have a
diffuser. Styles which come to mind are the clear LED filament
lamps, and the lamps with a single LED in the base, and a clear
plastic light guide to emit the light in multiple directions.
The general principle of such cut glass droplet chandeliers is
that the droplets refract the light like prisms and you see the
components of the white light in the form of individual spectral
colours glisten from the droplets. The higher the refractive
index (more expensive the glass), the more pronounced the effect
of spectral splitting of the light (with the inference that
diamond droplets would give the most pronounced affect of all,
being the highest refractive index).
It seems to me that LEDs could cheat here and use separate RGB
(and more) coloured LEDs to generate the white light from slightly
spaced apart sources, which would really enhance the appearence
though cut glass droplets, but I haven't seen any lamp products
designed to exploit this.
--
Andrew Gabriel
[email address is not usable -- followup in the newsgroup]
