What Makes a High Quality LED Strip?
The question comes up from time to time, what’s the difference between your LED products and things I can find on Amazon or eBay? An easy answer is all LED strips are not created equal. There are many factors that go into high quality lighting, like LED Chip Quality, PCB Backing, CRI, Contacts, Light Output, Ratings, Lifespan, batch size and more. Ellumiglow prides ourselves on making the highest quality LED Strip lights, starting from the bottom.
The PCB Back of our LED Strip lighting are made with a high grade copper, which provides enough rigidity to work with, but also remains flexible enough to contour into many shapes. We also add extra copper in our strip backing to allow for additional heat sinking from the LEDs. This allows the LEDs to cool properly, and also for our products to shine brighter than cheaper products. Low quality strips use a low grade, lightweight copper and tin mix which nearly falls apart in your hand. If applying once to a dorm room these strips can work OK, but dead pixels and whole strips shorting are the cause of bad PCB backing.
The LED Chips we use are all high quality chips from name brands companies like Osram, Samsung, and more. You can tell a quality diode right from the light output. Low cost strips tend to buy LED chips from outdoor markets in China, where quality control is not important to them. What usually happens is there is a large disparity of color outputs even when it is supposed to be a 4000K White light, as well as varying brightness throughout the strip. Because we buy our LEDs in large batches (generally over 1M diodes), each customer is recorded with a batch number when placing their order, and each subsequent order, the customer receives LEDs from the same batches. This means that each order that is placed with Ellumiglow has a consistent light output, just like the original order.
CRI (or Color Rendering Index) is a common used term in the lighting industry, meaning how true a light produces its light. Daylight for instance would be a CRI rating of 100. Low quality LEDs will have a CRI of 70 or 80, which tends to give a poor light output. This is especially noticeable in restaurants and retail environments when it is especially important to show the product, or food as true as possible. All of the LED Strips from Ellumiglow are a CRI of over 90, and in many cases, over 95. This is the highest CRI available to date across an entire product line.
All of our LED products have been tested and pass rigorous safety standards. Each strip complies to UL, RoHS, and CE standards and can be sold and installed in any country in the world. Many low cost strips have not been tested prior to leaving the facility and may not even work when they arrive to your door. In many cases they are illegal to install into a permanent installation and you could be fined or sited by government agencies.
As you can see, there are a number of reasons why our LED line is one of the highest qualities around, and we hope to work with you to help turn your project into a success! For questions or comments regarding our lighting products, please contact info@ellumiglow.com or call 877.615.6556.
