How to Compare Pricing for UV vs LED UV
/The way to compare the price of conventional UV first as LED is really, you kind of have to think about it two ways:
1: First is the initial outlay or the investment in the equipment itself, which when you are looking at that, depending on the application, they're either going to be similarly priced or conventionally UV to be is going to be less expensive. And that's of course an apples to apples comparison of water cooled if their water cooled. If you get into air cooled, it can be quite a good, less expensive.
But that's not really what it's about.
2: What you have to look at is what we call the cost of ownership. And over time, LED does not tend to incur more costs other than very basic maintenance costs, has very little downtime. The dyes themselves lasts 20,000 hours, right? So very low cost of maintenance.
When you take that same point of view of the conventional UV, it's a whole different story. Conventional UV has reflectors and shutters. They have the actual lamps for bulbs that need to be replaced, and just talk to anyone in the printing industry and you'll find out that those moving parts are always breaking and when you have to replace them, you have to turn the system down.
And so not only are you paying for the actual repair of those parts, but you're also paying for lost productivity while the system is down.
So again, combining both the initial outlay and the cost of ownership, LED is significantly less expensive.