Raw Lumens

Raw (or Calculated) Lumens

What is it?

• Theoretically, this is supposed to be the “raw” total of power available from the LEDs alone as a starting point.
• In reality, LEDs never run at exactly 100% of rated output due to thermal and other factors. 
• In practice, raw lumens is simple a made-up number roughly based on maximum available LED power, from the datasheet.
• This is very commonly used because it is simply read from the datasheet.
• This rating is often inaccurate, since there’s really no basis for how to come up with the number.

How do we use it at Diode?

• The entire offroad industry sees demand from customers for a “lumen” value since customers think lumens is the only important measurement.
• Therefore, we publish Raw Lumens for all offroad lamps and anywhere else necessary to be competitive with the market.
• Even though we publish them, these numbers are not practically useful – instead, we focus on intensity and beam pattern to describe output.