LED Buyers warning
I avoid LEDs that are made with silicone or plastic. The really cheap brands I’ve found that advertise higher wattage have silicone lens that much of the energy is refracted back into the LED. Some LEDs have a narrower beam similar to a magnifying glass. The rating of the LED might be misleading as they could be advertising its “amplified” milliwatt rating. This helps to stop light from being reflected back into the diode but having a powerful diode up front and not amplifying it is the way not to mislead. The light density can easily be manipulated to the naive consumer who doesn’t know this. When the light is focused and “amplified” it is just taking energy away from the surrounding area. It all averages out the same so don’t be mislead. It just sounds good when certain people all they go by is how many milliwatts per cm2 the LED has.
Beware – Models that you have to change heads. This is what 2 competitor manufacturers said about POLY LED.
Meanwhile, POLY LED has the highest fluence panels there are and they have one wavelength per panel and you DO have to change panels and get an all in one session like the panels that have 50% infrared and 50% red LEDs. It is way more expensive to have 3 panels with only reds or only blues than having one panel that has red, blue, infrared all in one. Lightwave is an exception as they have SBT diodes and don’t require as many diodes to do the same job as a high fluence older generation type diode. (I have taken one of their diodes apart and they definitely have a different diode than all the others. No one has copied the Lightwave SBT diode as they have a patent that no other led panels can copy.
Note: I have seen companies now say they have SBT style diodes. SBT “style” is not the same as an authentic SBT diode. Some companies use special lens to intensify the LED light making it more concentrated but that extra brightness making people think its some type of superluminous diode is not truthful. The beam is more concentrated but the fluence can be the same.
I am not promoting Lightwaves SBT diode just because I think it’s the best since they have a patent. It’s just at this time they have the most unique diode and sets it apart from all the others. If anyone sees an SBT style diode it must have the registered trademark and not say German style or SLT style diodes and try to mislead people.
Blue Diodes
The most expensive and hardest to produce diodes are the 420nm blue diodes. These cost about 15 times the price as the 415nm and 450nm diodes. Having it right in the middle gives the broadest spectrum blue. Note: there is a company that now has a 475nm blue spectrum diode. I hope those looking for the blue LED diode to ask if that was the wavelength that was approved by the FDA when they did tests on all the blue wavelengths from 415 to 475nm. (The 420nm was the wavelength that got approved and now companies want to make these diodes cheap and it costs much less to make 415 and 475nm diodes. It is unfair to the patient when they are trying to use the blue wavelength for a medical reason and they don’t know the truth.
Red Diodes
For Red Diodes, 630nm and 660nm are the most popular. Buying one over the other depends if someone wants to sacrifice deeper penetration. A 630nm higher wattage diode will always have more fluency and intensity than a 660.
For infrared, I will not use a LED light therapy device that has anything higher than 880nm. 940nm works decent but doesn’t give that “isolate” infrared. It is kind of like infrared saunas. So many have infrared but only a fraction of the far infrared isolate spectrum that is so hard to produce. That’s what makes a cheap sauna 995 dollars and a good one retail close to 5,000 dollars for the same size.
Infrared LED light Comparison
Manufacturers are making all types of diodes ranging from 850, 880, to 940nm. People are confused on which one to go with. The nanometer size when it comes to infrared when the number is lower it has longer waves so it can reach deeper into the skin into the dermis. The shorter infrared wavelengths have more energy and are stronger but don’t go as far. This is why when treating surface areas on the skin it is better to use a shorter infrared while those seeking deeper penetration will want a longer wavelength. The shorter wavelengths are hotter on the surface and many people like this but the longer wavelengths are not as warm and go deeper. The LED panels that have a low number of infrared diodes can generate a lot of heat when they are on the opposite end of the spectrum that the FDA Cleared the Infrared diodes that were done in the studies. When a company says “we have infrared diodes” and they were not the wavelength that the studies were done on, it is not fair to the consumer for a company that claims that.
So, when I have the Lightwave LED panels and they say one thing and then I go to the booth across and Lightstim is telling me something totally different, I have to do my own reviews to find out in the first person what is and what isn’t. I won’t say any company is lying to me. It’s just that there can be loopholes and so many ways to claim something. It’s like a juicer and it has a 3 horsepower motor. I want to know if that is a peak or constant horsepower. Also, they have fooled me in the past when I didn’t know what input vs output power was. When there are so many variables it is hard to know unless I test them all.
Some people will get LED devices that have LEDs that cost pennies to make each diode while other companies using gold and copper (not aluminum) will cost more and those that use glass diodes over silicone and plastic also. A good indication that a LED is really powerful is if it is a high wattage diode and it has a cooling fan. These diodes if the fan is not working can overheat. A cheap low powered LED panel that doesn’t get hot and doesn’t require a cooling fan probably is a very low milliwatt power level per diode. And if I see a high power rating, I know the results are not real world measurements.
For those that need help weeding through all these companies and want to find the right LED based on your quiz answers, take my LED Quiz. It helps!
