belbear wrote:

Well, we have incandescent, which is wasteful and hot, and florescent, which is kind of ugly and uses mercury, and LCD, which is cheap, durable, promising and gradually getting less ugly — and now perforated aluminum foil.

http://www.engr.uiuc.edu/news/archive/index.php?xId=071508160672

Kind of a foil sandwich with thousands of tiny plasma-filled gaps. Bright, flexible, and cheap enough to be disposable. Interesting!

Definitely interesting, given the current light sources.

They don’t mention what kind of electricity is needed to drive this panel. I suspect a rather high frequency AC voltage is needed.
This again assumes some drive electronics, the weak spot of fluorescent or LED lighting.

Sale of most types of incandescent lightbulbs is now prohibited in much of Europe, while the only alternative are those screw-in fluorescent lamps, which fail almost as often as the lightbulbs they replace.
Not that the fluorescent tube ever fails. The electronic unit fails, usually from overheating. So the mercury-containing lamp goes with the garbage..

Yes, there are LED lamps (not LCD, Brian), but they emit this ugly blueish light, and not very much of it. And LED lamps don’t have eternal life as so often advertised. They degrade rather quickly when overheating…

But if we all have cheap and clean fusion power, why not return to the venerable “Edison Electric Light” 🙂

Yeah, my bad. But the white/variable LEDs are getting better, fast. There’s a version which centers in the green area now, and looks very natural. http://www.freshpatents.com/-dt20090702ptan20090166652.php
http://www.thehindu.com/holnus/008200812201180.htm

The problem I see is that, as they are actually digital circuitry, they are not very heat tolerant, and require housings etc. that allow for lots of cooling. Not always convenient in practice.

Here’s more info on the microcavity plasma device : http://www.ece.illinois.edu/news/headlines/hl-eden-transistor.html