Coincidentally, a story on LED light efficiency reaching 100 lumens per watt appeared while I was reading my newsfeed. Which brought me to finding out that Cree & Philips are the top 2 LED lighting companies. Sadly Cree appears to have no presence here in the Philippines. I was told by a US-based interior designer that GE is also a great brand for LED.
Below is a timeline on how LED makers were able to improve the lumens per watt of LED lights.
What I learned from my research is that there are 100 lumens per watt LED lights being sold in the Philippines. For example the Philip 10.5w (85w equivalent to incandescent) produces 1055 lumens making its efficiency 100.48lm/W.
Other Philip LED lights vary from 96.55lm/W to 70lm/W.
lm/W is important as it relates to efficiency of the LED light. More light it produces per watt means you will not need to to spend more on power.
Another thing to consider and often ignored is the color rendering index (CRI). In a nutshell CRIrefers to the ability of the source of light to show the colors of various object as faithfully to natural light that is ideal. There is a scale to it which tops at 100. 100 being natural sunlight.
Ideally lm/W should be 90 or higher, power consumption below 10w, lumens more than 900, 90 or better CRI and more than 25,000 hour life.
So far I've seen LED lights that does all these things locally but exceed 80 CRI and reach 25,000 hour life.
Other brands I may not consider as they are not known to EnergyStar.gov. Yes, there are lots of cheap LEDs out there,
I visited a call center along EDSA a few months back and I was surprised at how good the lighting was in the place especially after I used the call center lights with my SLR.
I look forward to changing all my light fixtures to LEDs.