new laser lights promise extreme brightness, small size
Just saw this in another thread. No surprise it's getting passed around a lot! BMW will have them this year...
euphonius
Quote:
Laser lights are a reality
This was just posted to an ST1100 Honda group:
BMW is introducing a
new lighting technology (article is a tad technical, but not to hard to follow) that uses a blue laser to energize a phosphor element, creating a very small and very intense light source for headlights. The laser does not illuminate directly. Rather, like a black light causes fluorescent materials to emit light, the laser causes the phosphor element to emit the light.
The lighting system works incredibly well and is unbelievably small. How well? Picture Denali's top of the line DX1 at full intensity. It generates at maximum allowed output 828 lumens of light, and its focused beam can illuminate just over 200 meters away—not quite a soccer field. One of BMW's new lighting units would generate near 9,000 lumens of light and illuminate—brightly—over 2.25 kilometers away! And it would be around the size of a small shot-glass, about one-third the size of the Denali DX 1. The limiting factor on size would be the optics for the unit. They had to work down the intensity of the lights to stay within legal limits.
Another feature of these new lights is their heat output. High-intensity LEDs put out a lot of heat. The average operating temperature is around 105°C. BMW's lights operate around 25°C. You could hold one in your mouth if you had to. Heck, with a little Velcro, you could stick one on your helmet and illuminate wherever you turn your head.
The nice thing about these is that they are not a pipe dream. BMW is putting them into production this year. When they'll make it into motorcycles, I don't know. But I'm willing to bet it won't be long.
The article does continue a bit longer, and at the bottom they have a film where Audi was demonstrating—ready for this?—laser brake lights that illuminate onto the road and through smoke and fog. So, ACL's dream come true!
(Disclaimer: we'll never see direct illumination by lasers onto surfaces, because the coherent beam of the laser would reflect off wet surfaces and blind other drivers.)
