Hier noch Gründe für teurere Strips:
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Lots of things go into the price, but here's a couple generally found in professional grade strips:
- Copper weight: Good strips will use heavier copper for the PCB (2, 3, or 4 oz) which allows them to carry more current at a lower temperature. Functionally, this allows for longer single runs of LEDs with less voltage drop meaning more uniform brightness, but on top of this it will extend the life of the LEDs by having them run cooler. More copper is expensive, this alone can double or triple the cost.
- Brightness: Besides having brighter individual LEDs a lot of the time, they have more of them. That MossLEDs 196 LED/m strip for example puts out 3600 lumens per meter. The Philips strip (and this one you linked) max out at 800 lumens per meter (1600 lumens for 2 meters).
- Luminous Decay: This is essentially the lifetime of the LED, but beyond that, it's also how much the color shifts over time too. Cheap amazon LED strips can die out and shift color drastically in as little as a few months. This is also related to the temperature, which is related to the copper weight, and the operating current. A common 'trick' for cheap LEDs is to run them way above the recommended current so they are very bright out of the box and customers wonder why they would ever even bother with an expensive strip, that's not even as bright! This can kill them very quickly and you'll be replacing them way, way before the oft-touted 50,000 hours lifetime. Don't believe that without an LM-80 report at a minimum (you will never find one for amazon/ebay strips btw), but even with one this 'cheating' by running high current without adequate cooling will bring the lifetime way down from the spec of the actual LED chip.
- SDCM (Standard Deviation Color Matching): This is basically how much variation there is in the chromaticity of the LED both within, and between batches. A high number (7 SDCM) means that the colors will vary a lot and will be most noticeable when reordering the same item. If it comes from a different batch, the colors can be way off. A low number (SDCM 2 or 3 is typical of higher end strips) means that you are far less likely to notice any difference between batches and can reliably mix together side by side. This particular metric can add a LOT to cost for tighter tolerances: you essentially throw away the LEDs that don't fit the tolerance, and it can be 2/3 of the batch if you want it very tight! Mass producers have some solutions to this to remove some of the waste (internal binning to separate LEDs and only sell one bin to one customer, and another bin to another for eg.) but the more unique and custom the LED is, the more of a problem waste is. So a custom, high efficiency LED that is already expensive, with a tight tolerance can very easily increase the cost to 10 times that of a generic run of the mill LED, even in the same package size (like 2835 for eg).
- CRI (Color Rendering Index): This means they more accurately illuminate the objects in a given space by having a fuller spectrum of light. While this one doesn't necessarily have to increase the price significantly directly (though red phosphors are included for 90+ CRI, and much more for 95+ CRI with 90+ R9, and they are more expensive. Red phosphors are not present in most 80 CRI strips), there is an inherent 'penalty' for high CRI to efficiency by as much as 35% so in order to keep the same level of brightness, the blue LED chips underneath the phosphors (this is how most white light is created, the LED is actually blue and excited phosphors!) must be much more efficient to maintain the same level of brightness as a typical 80 CRI led strip.
- Constant Current: At least for the Environmental Lights RGB strip, they use a constant current design which adds ICs to the strip (and cost). The benefit of doing this is that, even with voltage drop across the strip, the brightness is unaffected and you get much more even lighting across the strip and bette color consistency for multichannel strips. It also means that the efficiency of the strip actually goes UP with length as well, up to the point where the voltage headroom left. It's not uncommon for a constant current design (at lower power mind you) to run as much as 20 meters or more with no loss of brightness and no need for extra wiring along the strip. They are also almost always temperature protected by the IC as well, meaning they reduce the current above a certain temperature to stop what's called 'thermal runaway' (higher temperature increases the current, which increases the temperature... this is also the problem of cheap strips!). This improves the lifetime of the strip also as a consequence.
In the case of the Absolute series by Waveform Lighting, and the CRI 98 D50 strip by Yuji, they are using a special violet LED as the source (~405 nm) instead of the typical blue one (~450 nm). These are way more expensive across the board, but they allow you to eliminate the blue spike for higher CCTs (5000k and higher) by spreading the energy out across a broader range in conjunction with a blue phosphor (and green and red phosphor). The blue phosphors as well are more expensive.
Disclosure: I design LED strips and control systems for a living (not for any of these companies linked)
