Aqua Illumination and Ecotech Marine announce that they are merging

Hahaha! ;D

This is me as well. I wish I had money to buy a higher end product that works right out of the box. I took the cheap route, have a LFS build me a controllable LED light and all I've gotten for the past 6 months are 2 pendants of LEDs that I can turn on/off and they aren't even working properly. No dimming, no control and the extra feature of lights just randomly blinking. So while I wouldn't be off to the store buying radions, I probably would have went reefbreeders or something in that range is I had to do this all over again. #veryfrustrated

 

I have now talked with reps from both companies. They have both assured me that the consumer will win in this merger. The bigest factor is that they will have more purchasing power which will enable them to negotiate higher quality LEDs at lower pricing. The other advantage is the combination of engineering staff. Both sides seem to have the lower priced fixtures on their radar. For the consumer, this is a great thing because if they take aim at competing with those fixtures their costs must come down. If they can get anywhere within 15%-25% the costs of fixtures like the Reef Breeders and such, it will be a win for consumers. Only time will tell. We will know more once we see the fruits of their combined efforts.

 

I remain cautious. I don't know enough to know, but I suspect the price of the LEDs themselves is not an appreciable chunk of the price of the fixture. Whatever their new slightly better margin is - even less.

 

Thanks for the updates G.Waiting patiently.......

 

Glad to hear cant wait to see what they come up with. Hopefully this is a truthful statement from the reps as I have to agree the LEDs are the same as in many other fixtures that are half te cost, more of a setting a price thing that a profitability off the led I would think.

Thanks for the update and taking the time to try and find some answers!!

 

That is the problem with LED. Unless you what bin the LEDs come from you don't know if they are the same. From what I'm reading you could have LEDs in the same family with nearly double the efficiency. It all depends in the tested quality of the actual LED.

It is my understanding that this merger will most notably allow them more buying power when seeking the better bins of LEDs.

Explaination from CREE about binning:

All XLamp LEDs are tested and sorted by color and brightness into a unique bin. each bin contains LEDs from only one color and brightness group and is uniquely identified by a bin code. White XLamp LEDs are sorted by chromaticity (color) and luminous flux (brightness). High voltage White XLamp LeDs are sorted by chromaticity, luminous flux and voltage. LEDs are shipped on reels containing LeDs from one bin and are always labeled with the appropriate bin code.