[RubenSandwich]

The efficiency claims of these are very nice:

Sulfur Lamp: 100 lumens per watt. [0]

Random LED Light bulb: 88.888 lumens per watt. [1]

~20% improvement.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20030818061414/http://195.178.16...

[1] https://www.amazon.com/TCP-Equivalent-Light-Bulbs-Non-Dimmab...

[VLM]

That's very unfair in that there's LEDs on experimental lab benches running 200+ lumens per watt (very handwavy). Something tells me you won't be getting amazon prime shipping on a 100 L/W sulfur bulb anytime before you're already getting amazon prime shipping for 200 L/W LED bulbs... Theoretically LEDs top out just under 300 L/W under ideal lab conditions, so a theoretical max of 100 L/W for sulfur is not so good.

The real competitor of these "ten kilowatt" class bulbs is theater-type arc lamp type devices where you can't deal with the weird spectral effects of LEDs and other quantum mechanical goofiness... Today you can buy COTS xenon lamps that run around 40 or so watts/lumen, so 100 L/W is a nice upgrade for stage and film theaters.

I don't know what sportsball stadiums use for night games. For raw bulk ugly illumination, sodium discharge lamps are COTS around 150 or so L/W, far surpassing what the sulfur bulbs can do in the lab. Interesting thought experiment is immense capex was dropped to illuminate sportsball fields and replacing the lights makes half the demand go away... so are sportsball fields going to be twice as bright at night or recycle all that power company infrastructure or is legacy pro sportsball going away with the boomers before sulfur bulbs could arrive commercially or ?

I don't see an easy way to decouple the magnetron and stuff from the lamp for sale purposes. A kilowatt class xenon lamp runs over a hundred dollars and figure a kilowatt class microwave oven and its innards could double the cost of a sulfur lamp while halving the cost of the electricity... this is really bad news for theater goers... it'll make theaters even more capital intensive which means even more risk adverse. If you're tired of formulaic remakes now, imagine when financial risk is twice as high due to double the bulb cost, LOL.

[d33]

This got me wondering what's the theoretical limit to lumens per watt and I found this:

https://electronics.stackexchange.com/a/360167/16009

[amluto]

My theater knowledge is dated, but there’s a major potential benefit for LED in theater: they can modulate quickly.

I’m familiar with two kinds of high-power theatrical lighting: tungsten and discharge. Tungsten is inefficient and has poor power factor when dimmed. Discharge lamps can’t cycle quickly, so, as a practical matter, they are turned in well before a show starts (to make sure they all work!) and stay on, at full power, until after the show. A motorized shutter modulates the light output. This wasted tons of power when the shutter is closed.

LEDs can cycle essentially arbitrarily quickly, and a good driver gets a power factor near 1.

I think it would be interesting to design a theater lighting system with a DC bus. Tungsten lights (where needed) would be driven by PWM, and LEDs would be driven directly by PWM if the voltages matched or with a DC-DC converter otherwise. There would be a battery to even out the load to minimize demand charges.

I don’t know what a three-phase AC-to-DC converter rated for, say, 100kW would cost. You’d want one that can be controlled such that it can share load in a controlled manner with a battery on the DC side.

[IndrekR]

> The real competitor of these "ten kilowatt" class bulbs is theater-type arc lamp type devices where you can't deal with the weird spectral effects of LEDs and other quantum mechanical goofiness...

Sulfur lamps have CRI < 80. High CRI (> 90) LEDs are real competitors to HID lamps here.

[baybal2]

Ultrabright water cooled LEDs have swallowed whole all remaining market niches for this technology.

LEDs are cheaper, and, more importantly, already there.

[emmelaich]

Similarly, sodium lamps get 100-150 lumens per watt. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium-vapor_lamp

Good for low light pollution too.

Popular in Australia; are they popular elsewhere?

[jessriedel]

What fraction of the lifetime cost of lighting is the power, vs. things like the manufacture, installation, maintenance, and disposal? Having a magnetron up there seems like a pain. Also, the noise?

[namibj]

The magnetron dies, and the thing doesn't scale down to a keychain flashlight like the 88lumn/W LED. We do have LEDs with >130lumen/W though...

[NiekvdMaas]

Plus a slightly longer lifetime (60k hours vs 50k for LED)