LED Spot Light?

You know the big spot lights you see in the sky. Can you make one out of LED lights? If so can you have different colors like red and would it be cheaper to run?

Public Comments

1. I think that that would be difficult. The reason is that LED's are difficult to focus. Experiment with an LED flashlight and you will see that the beam is really weak at a distance of 10 feet.
2. The big spot lights but out a lot of photons. You would need LOTS of LEDs to equal the amount of light coming out of a spotlight, so it probably wouldn't be feasible, at least not with today's LED technology. But they do come in many colors and are more energy efficient than other forms of light production.
3. Yes it is possible but not very feasible. If it was it would have been done already. LED's are already being used in some small scale spot lights such as stage lighting. Our theater uses several intelligent dmx fixtures that use red green and blue LED's to emit nearly any color of light. They do not put out nearly the amount of light that fixtures of similar size do though.
4. The spot lights you see in the air run many tens if not hundreds of amps. LEDs operate on milliamps, so you can see you need a lot of LEDs to equal one spot. And they are hard to focus, as Tim C said. Sometimes you can simplify things, and sometimes you cannot.