I'm looking to bump up my DIY bicycle taillight. The 3-watt generic LED's are several years old. What's the current highest lumens/watt and total output LED's? Cree has some interesting stuff, anything really better than all the others?
Thanks!
Not a ton of progress on RED LEDs over the last many years. You are unlikely to see much if any noticeable improvement by changing the LEDs.
Cree does not make their own red die. It's from Epistar, so I would not look to them for the latest and greatest. Osram, Lumileds, and Epistar at a die level are the leaders in red technology, but it has not progressed as much as blue as the underlying material is different and the ROI is less. There is still a lot of work on improving it, mainly to achieve highly efficiency RGB. In the near term, blue pump with a quantum dot phosphor for narrow emission may be the next jump.