A mate of mine knows a bloke who owns a lighting company and he kindly ordered a couple of amazing looking LED lights for my (lazy assed) buddy from this lighting supplier in China website...they look amazing: 90w and supposedly replacing 400/600 sodium/halide...with a much longer lifetime and no (little) heat output. I've seen one of them on and working and they look blindingly bright but weird colours but as yet he's not got a grow going with them so I/we have no idea how good or bad they are.
Does anyone have any idea or used this type? I think I'm gonna try and blag one of them from him and have a go myself. If they work...where is the downside here??

postscript..I'd also like to add...I have no connection with either the friend of my friends lighting company of which I have no idea of even its name or business type...nor am I in some way connected to a chinese LED manufacturer.

I'd just like to know if they work and/or let other people who might have a passing interest in growing things under lights about emerging products.

Here we go again.

One: Your link doesn't work. E2a Ok so now it works.

Two: Commercial links are not allowed here.

Three: Every discussion at this site has shown how much crap LED grow lites are. And it sounds like you are peer marketing. Do some research here for other topics to read on LED grow lites.

Oh dear.

Given that LEDs are no more efficient than small CFLs, looking at their website, how can they possibly claim that even 300 watts' worth doesn't need ventilating ?

I especially like the random photo of one of these lamps inside a greenhouse full of HPS lamps...

Click to view attachment

It looks particularly silly up there ....

Hmmm...fair enough...I just watched the youtube video of the test. That answers my questions and post. Bugger.

I wonder how much they had to pay the greenhouse owners/operators in order to have that picture taken?

Nah, don't feel so bad.

LED manufacturers are hyping up their products in all areas these days and they spend a fortune doing it.
They're a very useful technology - but horses for courses.

If you want to keep up to date with what they are good for, and all other lighting technologies, try sci.engr.lighting on USENET :-

http://groups.google.co.uk/group/sci.engr....en&ie=UTF-8

There are some very knowledgeable people posting there.

Thanks for that link! Here was the first posting I saw.

Yeah I know - they get some bonkers SPAM in there - helps to use a newsreader so you can filter some of it out.