Many times I need to provide and then design lighting systems and I've found that ( Lumen output ) is the key to a better system.. Only until several years ago have I recently incorporated the Lumen output into any design, I was always use to having an engineered drawing to follow.

I'm big on the Halogena brand which always seems to be the best value, the lamps are usually around $10.00 but to get 1200 lumens out of a 70w bulb is awesome ..

I've considered LED and aside from the quadrupled price, I'm still not sold on the Lumen output,granted they operate for less money but I don't want to loose the brightness, although I noticed the other day at a gas station these overhead LED 12 x 12's each containing about 20 little LED outputs ... those suckers were very bright. I'm guessing 10k Lumens per fixture.

Is LED in your opinions the better Illumination Product.

I use whichever light makes sense for the application, keeping the price in mind.

LEDs are improving rapidly, in lumen output, color temp, etc.

Pricing is another matter, although it seems to be adjusting downward as supply & demand increase.

I see a wide varity; strips in reach-in refrig/freezers, exterior lighting, replacement site lighting, 2x2 troffers, under cabinet, outline, and a lot of high-end recess.

Retailers are retrofitting LEDs into track ltg. and a lot of showcase lighting.

A real eye-catcher IMHO is the dual head emergency light pack & exit combos. A shutdown last Saturday nite...all the LED units were bright & still on after 4 hrs of no power! The light output from the E lights was really nice.

Yeah, what John said...

The industry is movie is very fast. It takes 9-12 months to get product to concept to production. The light modules are already obsolete. Unless you buy spare modules and drivers with the lights, chances are, you will be replacing the whole light if a module or driver dies a premature death. That can be an issue if the style of light is no longer availble. That's straight from the manufacturer mouth.

There are more and more styles however you are limited on lumen output options so pending on you lighting requirements and mounting height can be difficult.

Unlike MH and HPS, you can't pick a light solely on wattage and mounting height. To do a good job require home work and calculating. Reason being an LED light is made up of multiple little lights that can be focused in any configuration the light designer. There's an LED flash light that hold the world record for a focus beam of 1.6 miles with no halo.

Replacement LED bulbs can be an issue without proper ventilation. In addition replacement LED bulbs for all HID lights may require rewiring or bypassed, or will run on existing ballasts. Choose wisely.

Overall LED has great potential however the book has been rewritten on design and application.

When they come up with a dimmable LED that changes color as it dims like an incandescent they will have something.
It is not hardware impossible but it requires a controller that looks at the pulse width and shifts the color balance.

Indeed, they are!
In a former life, when LED lighting was fairly new, I did lighting design for a large railway workshop. Originally we inteded to use 400 W high-pressure mercury fixtures for both general and emergency lighting but soon realised we'd need an insane battery bank to achieve the necessary lighting levels. I think we were around 6 400 W fixtures for 1 lux 30 cm above the floor. Then we switched to the brand new LED emergency lights and lo and behold, we were (at least in theory) able to achieve the same lighting level using eight 10-Watt LED packs! 80 Watts instead of 2400.

Unfortunately I don't know how the real product turned out, so I can't say if theory and practice lined up.

I just installed a bunch of LED elights. They are brighter and smaller then their counter parts so touch up painting may be in order. The ones I used were surface mount. I didn't think about it when ordering but three of the lights I replaced, piped directly into the light in which my replacement light was not built for.

We just finished a mockup with LED fixtures.
4 LEDs at 188 Watts each are actually brighter than the existing 6 500 Watt halogens.
WOW!!!

The photometrics on the LEDs are execellent if you get the right distribution package. I have software for lighting calculations where I was getting too good to be true numbers. The light modules are so customizable, each individual LED bulb within a module can be focused differently to meet the designer needs.

I'm convinced that LED lamps are the future, for power efficiency reasons alone. Prices will fall with quantity production. As others have commented, the rapid developments in technology mean that current items are already obsolete,- obviously a problem with maintenance. There appears to be little standardisation of lamp designs yet. I'm sure that would help. As regards domestic use of MR16/GU10 types for retrofit, (which I've dabbled in a little), the main limitation seems to be that they are much more directional than halogens, tending to give pools of brightness and dark areas.

I flat out ask the experts on standardrization. Drivers yes. Modules is highly unlikely at least for the near future. This is due to proprietary issues, heating and cooling issues, and the fast pace of the technology. There's retro fit bulbs out there for incandescent as well as all forms of HID lighting. There again, performance will vary greatky due to heating and cooling. There's no way for anyone to cert a replacement bulb made today that they will give good performance in a fixture that was installed 10 years ago in who knows where environment. This will be the same issue with new, LED lights of today and tomorrow.

Watch out for fly by night operations. Junk is abound out there