Posted under Gadget Reviews
This post was written by Journalist on May 6, 2011
Osram’s New LED Camera Flash: Smaller, Brighter, Even-er
Osram, the lightbulb company, has come up with a bright new LED lamp for use in cellphones. Called the Oslux, it is 50% brighter than other LEDs, but more importantly for taking photographs, the light is flatter and “more evenly distributed”. This means that the light-falloff towards the edge, something common to regular and LED flashes alike, is reduced. This in turn gives a bigger patch of usable light.
The chip that does this all is smaller, too, at 2.5mm (shaved down from 3mm). How does it manage to be so bright? “New UX:3 chip technology that makes the LED capable of handling high currents.” That “high currents” part sounds like bad news for your cellphone battery.
Your photos will still be ugly, though, with washed-out faces and harsh shadows. Which brings me to a question about cellphone “flashes”. The lenses are tiny, so why not make a ring-flash that wraps around them? That way, shadows would be cancelled out (or, rather, filled in) and instead of bad snapshots you’d get a great fashion-shoot look to all your snaps. I’m serious. Why isn’t somebody doing this already?
The fancy Oslux lamps will find their way into cellphones as soon as a phone manufacturer decides it needs a new bullet-point on the feature-list.
Powerful LED flash for cell phones [Osram]
jQuery(‘#inf_widget’).load(‘http://www.wired.com/ajax/widgets/related/content/blogPost/gadgetlab_54729′);
Source:wired.com
Posted under Gadget Reviews
This post was written by Journalist on November 29, 2010
LEDs Add Faux-Flames to Electric Hobs
Gadget Lab reader John Costello sent in his ingenious invention, one of those ideas so simple that you slap your forehead and wonder why it hasn’t been done before. John has designed an induction hob which uses LED “flames” to stop you turning it up too high.
While induction hobs give the instant control of a gas flame, there is no way to see how high you have set the heat (there are numbers on the knob, but that’s hardly intuitive). John noticed that people would set the controls too high, so he decided to fix it.
His hob uses LEDs arrayed around the perimeter of the heat-rings. these project a light onto the pot which varies in height depending on the amount of heat dialed-in. As the power creeps higher, so do the “flames”, giving visual feedback that can be read by anybody, even from afar.
I love it. I still use gas, as I like to melt the plastic handles off my stovetop espresso pots every few months, but if I went to electric, it would certainly be induction, and I’d like to have John’s electric blue flames licking up the sides of my saucepans.
Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.
Source:wired.com
Posted under Gadget Reviews
This post was written by Journalist on August 27, 2010
