New kid in town

When I got word of new lighting company LDDlight.com I will admit that my first thought was, "Great, another LED lighting company. Just what the world needs.” But now that I’ve perused their web site I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.

First, some background: as best I can tell, LDDlight is a joint venture between IMAC and Symco of Japan and three ex-NERLITE employees. They launched on-line in October 2009 and appear to offer a full range of machine vision LED lighting.

Their unique selling proposition seems to be that they provide an on-line store with transparent pricing. In other words, there’s no calling up your local distributor to haggle over price, something that always leaves me wondering if I’ve been screwed (in the nicest way possible, of course!) So if you’re pricing up a system and need to include the cost of lighting, LDDlight make that very easy for you. On the downside, I have to say that cheap they are not. Pricing is getting in to CCS territory, but having not tested the product, I can’t say if the quality is comparable.

Also on their web site are a number of useful technical notes on machine vision lighting. For example, there’s a “Light Selection Checklist” (not so much a checklist as a diagram really,) and this interesting note on “Color Considerations.” A feature of the latter that caught my attention was a table relating scatter to wavelength: apparently, “The shorter wavelength and higher scattering rate of a blue light results in more apparent surface defects than that of a red light. “ That’s something I hadn’t thought about before.

LDDlight. You heard it here first.