Which Is The Brightest LED Light Strip?

Lighting has become indispensable in modern society. The atmosphere and ambiance of different spaces can be reflected through lighting.

Want to add LED lighting to your space, light brightness is a very important point worth your consideration.

We usually use the light seen by the naked eye to measure the brightness of the LED strip lights. But actually, it has a more professional method to calculate.

How Bright Are LED Strip Lights?

High brightness has always been one of the characteristics of LED light strips. It is enough to illuminate your place.

As shown in the picture below, a large office area is illuminated by LED strip lighting. The LED strips are installed in the suspended aluminum channels, hanging from the ceiling.

And as you can see, it does not use other additional lighting as a supplement. All this indicates that the LED strip lights are bright enough.

The Importance Of LED Brightness

Brightness plays a big role in how your lighting feels.

After finishing work or long hours of exertion, we often need an environment that can let us relax and relieve fatigue. At this time, warm and comfortable light is what we need, it makes us feel relaxed and at ease. On the contrary, if you walk into a room with harsh lights, trust me, you won’t feel very good.

We are always looking for proper lighting for the activities we are doing at the moment.

When we focus on our work, we need bright lights to keep us focused and see more details. And in places like bars and KTV, dim light is often better for entertainment.

What Is Related To LED Light Brightness?

On any product page of LED light strip suppliers, we will see a variety of LED strip parameters, but never see a specific brightness value.

This is because the brightness of LED lights depends on many factors.

Wattage

In the days of incandescent light bulbs, we used wattage to measure the brightness of light. A higher wattage meant a brighter brightness.

Now, however, wattage more accurately refers to how much energy the lamp needs to consume. A LED lamp with a higher wattage may not be as bright as it could be.

A 40-watt incandescent light bulb produces roughly 450 lumens. While 450 lumens of a LED light strip only needs 3.5W. 3.5W LED strip light lumens is exactly equal to a 40W incandescent light.

And we can also learn that LED light strips do save energy, so you can reduce your electricity bill.

Lumen

Today, many designers and architects often use lumens, rather than watts, when measuring how much light is needed to illuminate the space. Lumen can be equated to brightness. The higher the lumen, the brighter the LED strip is.

You can refer to the lumen output per foot or per meter to choose a strip light as a way to adequately illuminate your room or other larger place.

LED Light Efficiency

LED luminous efficiency refers to how many lumens a strip lighting can produce by consuming one watt of energy. A LED lights strip that produces more lumens per watt is what we call a high efficiency LED strip.

Obviously, high efficiency LED strip lights are brighter than regular strip lights. They can produce 130 to 190 lumens per watt.

Lights strips should not be all about brightness either. LED lights strips working at high currents can generate too much heat, which then leads to damage.

For higher brightness, match with the proper current design, such as constant current design (the current flowing through each LED is constant), to keep them in the best thermal management condition, and to ensure the life of the LED strip lighting.

Warning: Beware of the words with the brightest LED strip lights. Using inferior LEDs, even if it achieves bright light for a while, is not a long-term solution.

Color Temperature

The level of light color temperature affects your perception of lighting color and space.

LED color temperature is expressed in CCT (correlated color temperature), which is used to describe the color of white light only.

The kelvin color temperature goes from low to high, the LED color goes from warm to cold, and the light brightness goes from dark to bright.

Color Temperature	1000K	2000K	3000K	4000K	5000K	6000K	7000K	8000K	9000K	10000K
Light Color	Orange Yellow	Sun Color	Warm White	Natural White	Cool White	Daylight	Blue White	Blue White	Blue White	Blue White

Different color temperatures of LED strips don’t look the same color.

• 2700K color temperature and 3000K color temperature look like warm yellow (low brightness).
• 7000K color temperature is light blue, like the light of a sunny day (super high brightness).
• 4000K color temperature is located between cool white and warm white, which is also called neutral white or natural white (medium brightness).

In the color temperature scale, the brightest LED light strips are 6500K. It is the whitest color, and is the color of daylight. 

Generally speaking, LED strips lights with high color temperature (bias white) visually look brighter than that with low color temperature (bias yellow).

In the 5400-6300K color temperature range, the average gain in apparent brightness is 1% per 100K color temperature difference. ^[1]

Which LED Strip Lights Are The Brightest?

If you are struggling to find super bright led strips, congratulations, you found this blog and saw it here.

Here are the most popular bright led light strips on our site.

1. Brightest LED Strip Lights (Quad Row)

This brightest led strip comes with four rows of 3528 SMD LEDs, with 480 lights in one meter, a very high density. You can add it to your task lighting.

High density led strip often needs to strengthen heat management. Aluminum profiles are a great solution.

2. Brightest RGB LED Strip Lights (Single Row)

This led strip light uses SMD5050 super bright RGB LED as the light source, with a standard density of 60 LEDs per meter.

It is a good choice for creating atmosphere lighting. It can display seven static colors and a variety of dynamic lighting effects.

If you want to upgrade your bedroom, living room, or game room, consider this color changing led light strip.

3. Bright White LED Light Strips (Single Row)

This is a CCT adjustable color temperature strip light with a color temperature range from 2800K soft white to 7000K cool white.

It gives you the power to decide what color it displays to match your mood or what is happening.

4. Super Bright LED Strip Lights Waterproof (Double Row)

This is a dual row LED strip protected by a waterproof silicone sleeve. With IP67 or IP68 waterproof rating, it can be used outdoors.

High density 240 LED lights a meter, it meets your outdoor vision needs.

Why Are My LED Strip Lights Not Bright?

If your LED strip is not too bright when you first buy it, I’m sorry to tell you that you may have bought a bad quality strip light.

If you use it for a period of time and find that the brightness is dimmer than it was at the beginning, there are several reasons for this:

• Light decay – This is an unavoidable natural loss. It’s a slow process.
• Dust accumulation to mask the light – Clean the light strip or add diffuser channels as protection
• Voltage drop – Insufficient power supply, resulting in a significant decrease in brightness at the end of the strip

How To Choose The Right Brightness For Your Place?

You can calculate what kind of light strip you need for your space by the lumens. Here are a few steps to help you figure out how much light you need for your room.

1. Calculate the area of your room in square feet or square meters.

Measure the width and length of your room with a tape measure, and the width times the length is your room area. If your room is not a regular shape, divide it into even shapes and estimate.

Example: You have a room that is 10 feet long by 10 feet wide (3 meters long by 3 meters wide), then your room area is 10 feet * 10 feet = 100 square feet (3 meters * 3 meters = 9 square meters).

2. What your room is used for?

Task areas (kitchen, office, study room) need enough lighting. Rest areas (bedroom, living room), on the other hand, have less stringent requirements for light brightness. The purpose and use of your room determine how many lumens it needs.

You can quickly get how many lumens you need per foot or per meter of your place with the table below.

Lighting Type	Required Lumens
Accent lighting	100-350lm/ft, 328-1148lm/m
Mood lighting	100-350lm/ft, 328-1148lm/m
Under cabinet lighting	175-525lm/ft, 475-1722lm/m
Task lighting (smaller spaces)	280-437lm/ft, 920-1433lm/m
Task lighting (large space)	500-1000lm/ft, 1640-3280lm/m
Indirect lighting (large spaces)	375-562lm/ft, 1230-1843lm/m
Industrial lighting	500-950lm/ft, 1640-3116lm/m

3. Use your room dimensions times the recommended footcandle or lux.

We use a candle or lux to express a light source that illuminates one square foot or square meter.

Multiply the calculated room area by the recommended candela or lux for that room to get the lumens you need.

Note that candlelight is measured in square feet and lux is measured in square meters.

Example: A 100 square foot bedroom requires 100*(10-20)=1000-2000 lumens. A 9 square meter bedroom requires 9*(400-600)=3600-5400 lumens.

Room Type	Recommended Candlelight / sq. ft.	Recommended Lux / sq. m.
Living room	10-20	700-1000
Kitchen (general lighting)	30-40	1000-1500
Kitchen (task lighting)	70-80	1500
Dining room	30-40	500-700
Bedroom	10-20	400-600
Bathroom	70-80	1500
Home office	60-80	6000-8000
Hallway	5-10	100-300
Work area or garage	80-100	8000-10000

Dimmable…

Dimmable LED strip lights give the brightness movable range. You are able to set the right level of brightness depending on your mood or what you are doing…

[1] R. E. Harrington, “Effect of Color Temperature on Apparent Brightness,” J. Opt. Soc. Am. 44, 113-116 (1954)