NTHU professor Jou has been researching the hazards of blue light for many years, warning us against the hazards of modern lighting and focusing on OLED lighting as the technology that enables low blue-light emission lighting.
In 2015, NTHU started to develop its low blue-light candle-light orange-type OLED technology, initially in collaboration with Wisechip and later with China-based OLED lighting producer First-o-lite.
In December 2018, First-o-lite, together with NTHU, launched the first candle-light OLED desk lamp. First-o-lite kindly sent us a review unit of this lamp.
So first of all, the desk lamp itself is beautifully built and seems to be of very high quality - in fact this whole product does, from the box to the way it handles. The lamp comes folded - and you can easily fold it again in a very neat way.
As you can expect - operating the desk lamp is easy - you just plug it an and turn it on. It includes a touch-based dimmer which works very well.
The candle-light OLED emits a very yellow (or orange) and warm kind of light - at around 1900K. The panel itself is a rectangular 22 x 8.5 cm OLED panel that outputs 100 lumens at 2.4 W (42 lm/W).
This yellow kind of light is supposed to be very good for our eyes. I could not test this scientifically of course - but I can say that the light itself is pleasant and very "soft". However, it is visibly more yellow than is customary in desk lamps, which could take some time to adjust to.
I asked my daughter to do her homework to the light of the desk lamp. After a few minutes she complained about the light - it is not what she is used to. This is something to consider - it probably needs some getting used to. The whole idea is to adopt this kind of light for meaningful periods and tasks, of course, and not just in addition to other lighting sources. Indeed First-o-lite confirmed to us that many first-time users are not used to read under candle-light, even though it is the preferred light type to use. It shouldn't take long to get used to this orange white light source, though.
First-o-lite apparently has a capacity to produce around 30,000 such panels each month. The retail price is $199 - although First-o-lite told us that it does not intend to sell it directly to consumers but only offer it to business partners and distributors.
