Firstly, a thank you to Thurmond in TX for the LEDs he sent me that arrived this morning. I immediately swapped out the incandescent in my daughter's torch, with batteries charged in the summer from our solar.
WARNING: do not look directly into bean with remaining eye!
More serious playing with the rest of them when I feel a slack moment coming on (and when I've sorted myself out some constant current bench supply).
Secondly, just to show you how sad I am, I'm all excited over testing two new LED lamps that should beat CFL efficiency (ie more light out per unit of power in at ~80lm/W compared to CFL's typical 60lm/W).
I put in a technical query with LightPlanet here in the UK (who I noticed in an ad on my own page!) and a sensible person phoned me back about 10 minutes later which is amazing.
So I've bought one and I am borrowing another to write up on my page.
They remain more expensive than CFLs for now but should last even longer, now use even less power for a given amount of light, contain no mercury, and have no warm-up time...
LightPlanet is also crowing that the light quality (eg colour rendering) is very good from their warm white, and that is something that I'll be checking.
Rgds
Damon