New LEDs for your microscope - tardigrade friendly cold light! (II) |
Fig. 1: The metamorphosis
of ancient high voltage bulbs to high performance LED lights |
Fig. 2 is a close-up view illustrating the inner structure of bulb #4 made up of 24 single LED elements arranged in rows and columns, packed on a rather small surface area. |
Fig.2: Close-up view of bulb #4 (under low current condition - with full power the LED elements appear to merge into a single rectangular area). |
And as already pointed out this lamp has a standard E14 (14 mm) bulb thread, i.e. the thread of the samller European bulbs. As a consequence the old-fashioned high voltage E14 bulbs can be simply plug&play exchanged against modern E14 LED bulbs - perfectly reversibly! Let's demonstrate this on the basis of a vintage Hertel & Reuss microscope: |
Fig. 3: Hertel & Reuss microscope, serial no. 93380, built around 1970. Binocular, with photo tube (okay: let's accept the term "trinocular" as well :-). Low voltage illumination by means of a massive transformer delivering 35 W illumination power, a value which might appear competitive even today, in our miraculous LED era. According to the contemporary Hertel & Reuss nomenclature this instrument can be labelled as a "CN-hF-BINfo-VK-ZT" (to be deciphered as: series C-new/high stand/binocular with photo tube/rectangular table/condenser height adjustable by rack and pinion). The list price of a roughly comparable CN-hF-instrument in the year 1974 added up to DM 1658.-- (net price, without taxes) which can be roughly translated to a present price of US $2,000. The instrument shown here was acquired via Ebay in 2015 for a ridiculous price below 100 US $. The seller had no intention to perform rudimentary cleaning and didn't intend to place this jewel into appropriate light. Moreover we have an added bonus of a ready-to-LED switch option. |
Fig. 4: Hertel & Reuss microscope, back side view with removed lamp housing. Please note the old fashioned E14 filament lamp. |
Now we can simply replace the old-fashioned bulb by the modern
E14 LED bulb. That's it. The geometry and lightpath are quite okay. No soldering!
Moreover this is fully reversible and you can return to your beloved E14 furnace
in case you should want to.
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