September 2014
I'm been working a lot with high power LEDs now that they're so affordable. I'm especially fond of the UV LEDs for visual effects at night, but I've heard that some UV LEDs can cause blindness, and that I should use a UV bulb to create the effects. Is this true? Can someone explain the difference?
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The safety difference between a UV light bulb and a UV LED stems from the difference in radiance between the two sources. Radiance is basically the density of light in the source.
The surface area of an incandescent-size lamp is approximately 100,000 sq-mm. The source area of a high power LED is perhaps 2 sq-mm. While its likely a single high power LED will produce less optical energy than the bulb, the radiance is still likely thousands of times greater for the LED and hence its greater potential for eye damage.
In practice, as long as you don't look directly at the light source but rather the light reflected from the objects of interest, there is little difference between the two sources.
