Let’s start off by saying that color mixing is nothing new. In fact, RGB color spaces have been around for about one hundred years! The discovery of the LED also happened around a hundred years ago. There must have been some fate intertwining the two technologies.
When we mix red, green, and blue light, we can basically get any color possible. A new set of mixing technology can be seen in Samsung TVs which adds yellow in order to gain an ever so slightly wider possible mix of colors.
This mixing technology is much larger than cheap, imported Chinese toys would lead us to believe. If you have been to Las Vegas recently, or many major cities, you would notice buildings, bridges, town halls, andmajor architecture with color-changing LED installations. Do these casinos and government projects pay someone big money? Let’s just say that someone out there is only seeing green when you watch many different colored lights!
In fact, Phillips owns every major patent related to LED color mixing technology, which they bought from Color Kinetics. More than that, it takes a lot of control to get the same red, green, and blue output from each LED, or a costly calibration to match all the pixels. It’s is of course important, so that a color-changing set of lights produces the same mixed color! Patent lawyers, Color science, manufacturing engineers, nd semiconductor researchers are all involved and you’d better believe none do it for free.
Sure, the cheap toys avoid patent licenses, correct color binning, and pick the lowest quality LEDs. Did you know the “real deal” is so much different from our everyday cheap experience? The next time you pass a set of dancing colored walls, or jumbo sized LED billboard, you might just think how much more there is to it than you ever imagined before!