A tidal wave of new LED products is flooding the 475 booths at this year's LightFair trade show and conference in Las Vegas, which is attracting more than 20,000 lighting professionals. In addition to new LED products from established lighting players and long-time LightFair exhibitors such as GE Lighting, Philips, Osram Sylvania, Cooper Lighting, WAC Lighting and Acuity Brands, Sharp and Toshiba were on the scene for the first time and announced their intentions to aggressively market their LED products in the U.S. market. Schneider Electric, through its Juno Lighting subsidiary, and Hubbell Lighting also had broad offerings of new LED products.
Nowhere was the overwhelming emphasis on LEDs at the show more apparent than in LightFair's annual Innovation Awards, which this year attracted almost 200 submissions in 14 product categories. Many of the product categories were almost all LED products. This year's big winners were:
Helieon Sustainable Light Module System by Bridgelux and Molex: Most Innovative Product of the Year—the program's highest award, recognizing the best, most innovative new product;
Light-Drive Elite by Traxon USA: Design Excellence Award—recognizing outstanding achievement in design and application;
SSL2102 by NXP Semiconductors: Technical Innovation Award—recognizing the most forward-thinking advancement in lighting technology;
LightLouver Daylighting System by LightLouver: Judges' Citation Award—special recognition of an innovative product at the judges' discretion.
About the Author
Jim Lucy Blog
Chief Editor
Jim Lucy has been wandering through the electrical market for more than 30 years, most of the time as an editor for Electrical Wholesaling, Electrical Marketing newsletter and CEE News. During that time he and the editorial team for the publications have won numerous national awards for their coverage of the electrical business. He showed an early interest in electricity, when as a youth he had an idea for a hot dog cooker. Unfortunately, the first crude prototype malfunctioned and the arc nearly blew him out of his parents' basement. Before becoming an editor for Electrical Wholesaling magazine and Electrical Marketing, he earned a BA degree in journalism and a MA in communications from Glassboro State College, Glassboro, NJ., which is formerly best known as the site of the 1967 summit meeting between President Lyndon Johnson and Russian Premier Aleksei Nikolayevich Kosygin, and now best known as the New Jersey state college that changed its name in 1992 to Rowan University because of a generous $100 million donation by N.J. zillionaire industrialist Henry Rowan. Jim is a Brooklyn-born Jersey Guy happily transplanted in the fertile plains of Kansas for the past 20 years.