When it comes to the cosmetic industry there are many instances where suppliers may occasionally provide specifications which are not entirely accurate, and there a few ways in which this is done. Apart from the common practice of just outright lying about specifications, below are a few of the ways which it is done legally by many companies
- Quoting the electrical power input, not the LED power output
- Quoting number of diodes instead of power output
- Multiple wavelengths at once
Electrical input vs electrical output
This is the most common deception played on specifications where instead of the power output (how much light is coming out), suppliers will instead quote how much electricity goes into the LED. In a world of perfect efficiency this wouldn’t be an issue, but let’s take for example two household light globes.
In this example we have two different types of light globes: one being the old 240 watt incandescent light globe, and the other being the new 20 watt florescent light globe (pictured above). Both of these light globes provide the same amount of light output which is ultimately what you want for your clients, but the 240 watt incandescent bulb wastes a high percentage of its energy on heat and electrical losses. What is interesting is that for cosmetic LED’s the vast majority of the power specifications we use are the input and not the output. There are many LED’s which use highly efficient globes and are quoted at 60mw/cm^2 and provide far more light than other LED’s which quote specifications at 140mw/cm^2. This is why you see a proliferation of Chinese systems at various expos claiming extraordinarily high power outputs, yet when you use them they don’t seem to deliver.
Comparing power specifications provided by suppliers means very little when it comes to LED therapy.
Quoting the number of diodes
Quoting the number of diodes is a red herring as it misleads one to conclude that one system is more powerful than others on the market. It is not hard to see the logic: If a device has more LED diodes in the system, then it must automatically be assumed to be more powerful. However, this is not the case. What many clients fail to realise is that there exist thousands of different types of diodes with different performance outputs. Many systems that have tens of thousands of diodes are severely under-powered.
The reason for this is that some manufacturers place far larger quantities of diodes than the device’s power supply and the fans’ ability to handle, and therefore allow them to only run below their maximum capacity (or else the LED will melt). This is equivalent to saying that a device has 300 watts of power available, but it can only run 100 watts or else the system will overheat. Are you therefore getting the 300 watts your supplier quoted you, or only 100 watts in reality and in practice?
Also, there are three major types of diodes which they can be categorised into. These are pin based diodes, surface mount diodes, and chip on board diodes. There are many technical differences between the three but the major difference is their ability to be cooled down effectively allowing them to be placed in a smaller space. Many of the cheaper systems in the market use pin based diodes, which are the most guilty culprits for the paragraph above.
Multiple wavelengths at once
In some cases, what suppliers may do is group all of their wavelengths together into one set of power outputs. For example, they may have red at 40mw/cm^2, blue at 30mw/cm^2 and infrared at 60mw/cm^2. Would it then be reasonable to say that the system has a power output of 130mw/cm^2? No.
The issue here is that you cannot run all of these wavelengths at the same time. It’s a bit like saying, “My car runs at 400km/h because all four of my wheels are travelling at 100km/h.” You can only run one of these functions at a time, and even on systems which can run multiple wavelengths at once, they drop the power from one wavelength to place it into the other, so the maximal power output is still identical.
There is a lot more to choosing an LED system than what meets the eye, and we have sifted through over 100 LED’s to ensure that the systems we recommend are the best in the industry. Not only do we have the suppliers’ specifications, but our own spectrometers (to measure the wavelength output), luxmeters (to measure the power output) and a variety of other technology to ensure that all of our data is correct.
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