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Let's take a bulb, and instead of one led we have 10 less powerful leds in one package.

Now you can turn off leds one at a time, have 1/10th dimming, and no pwm.

The same could be done with LCD backlighting or edge lighting on displays. Additional complexity, to be sure, but no power loss.

OLED is, well.. oled. Not sure what to do there.



Except that perceived illumination is log, not linear ;)


All the better for low light situations then.


And effectively useless for dimming in the upper half of the intensity range.

You could of course turn on/off leds in an exponential fashion, but that would result in an impractically large light to be able to dim properly, and with increased cost (much cheaper to assemble fewer more powerful leds than many smaller ones).


I'd just wire some in quads, and some in pairs to save on complexity.

Then maintain a 1/10 lux range with the combinations. Note I'm not doing the math, just showing how simple it is to work around. It's all just napkin.

The cost isn't a biggie, if it's for a target market and shares the rest of the assembly.




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