As night falls, a city landscape transforms itself with exquisite and fantastic, tiny light bulbs. At night, buildings, bridges, and public parks are dressed in a variety of colors and dimming effects. Digital lighting effects dramatically change the landscape. The degree of its flexibility is limited by your imagination.

LEDs in the Spotlight of the Landscape Lighting Market
A landscape means scenery, specifying everything on the surface of the ground. A landscape can be classified into environment landscape and commercial landscape. All lighting fixtures, which are applied into both landscape areas, are landscape lighting. The first thing that we must consider in installation is safety. For commercial landscapes, promotional and marketing activities should be given serious consideration. Generally, in a country that has a US$ 10,000 GNP, landscape lighting will be getting public attention, and as the GNP reaches US$ 20,000, it gets further into its stride. As for the Korean landscape lighting market, this technology had been first introduced immediately after the 1988 Olympic Games. Now, it seems that the market is stable. During and after the 2003 World Cup, the landscape lighting market has dramatically grown. Yoonkyung Her, the design manager of Nuriplan Inc., said, "It takes time to build a structure, but the installation of landscape lighting does not require time. Therefore, it is so time and cost-effective in upgrading the look and the feel of a structure." She added, "Since landscape lighting installation that has been incorporated into LEDs has been expanded, a great number of provincial cities are choosing this technology so that they can transform a dark world into a welcome fantasy of light." Jung Mi, president of EON SLD, revealed that LED products account for 50% ~ 60% of the market share in the landscape lighting market. We cannot anticipate LEDs' market share in the landscape lighting industry because of their rapid growth over the past few years. The landscape lighting industry finds LEDs as the only substitute for existing lighting fixtures because of cost effectiveness on maintenance, much longer life span, and lower electricity consumption.

20% Brighter at 30% Lower Price Every Year
From 1997 to 1998, in which blue LED chips were first developed, the LED market had achieved the best record in development and research. Taeyoon Kim, president of Hyunin Electrics, mentioned that the 512 protocol of the DMX Controller, which was invented in 1982, was theoretically able to reveal 16 million colors. With the technology, any color can be acquired with an LED lamp. Countless colors offer the advantage of operating full-color, electronic message boards, and helping in landscape lighting. Landscape lighting designers can also create art works with the colors of their choice. As for existing lighting fixtures, the look and touch of a building would seem disorderly in the daytime because multitudinous lighting fixtures would be required to achieve all colors. With LEDs, colors can be so flexible, and they do not require as many as other lighting fixtures. Currently, LED chips have been 20% brighter, but their prices have declined by 30% yearly. Except for the 20,000-hours life span of white color LED chips, all other LED chips can be used for 100,000 hours.

Decreasing the Heat Emission Rate of LEDs
A controversial point on LED chips is that they can be so sensitive to heat. When the temperature rises up to 100 degrees, LED chips can be considerably damaged. Now, LED chips convert only 20~30% of the total consumed power into light energy, and 70% is released in heat. It is expected that the ratio of energy and heat emission will be 5 is to 5 until 2008, in which LEDs will be universally used. Another challenge is its own characteristics. Lighting from both neon and natrium is completely different from LEDs. Every type of lighting fixture has a distinctive color and feel. The environment surrounding the area where the lighting source will be installed will be a crucial factor on the decision on the type of lighting fixture that will be used. Therefore, LEDs cannot be the only type of lighting used as landscape lighting. The price of lighting fixtures is so critical when decorating an enormous space, including the entire landscape and building. Though the price of LEDs has been declining 30% every year, they are doubly more expensive than existing landscape lighting fixtures.