COB Process Costs and Optical/Electrical Properties
Process Costs
SMD Full-Color: This product has higher raw material costs and more complex manufacturing processes, resulting in higher investment and overall costs.
COB Full-Color: COB eliminates the bracket concept, eliminating electroplating, reflow soldering, and surface mount technology, reducing processes by 1/3. While its efficiency in die bonding and wire bonding processes is comparable to SMD, COB packaging is significantly more efficient in dispensing, separation, beam splitting, and packaging. Traditional SMD packaging's labor and manufacturing costs account for approximately 15% of material costs, while COB only accounts for 10%, resulting in a cost reduction of at least 5% compared to SMD full-color.
Optical/Electrical Properties
COB full-color offers superior color consistency, a wide viewing angle, uniform light spot, higher brightness, and better color mixing-features and advantages that SMD full-color and dot-matrix full-color LEDs cannot surpass. With its wide viewing angle and high brightness, COB utilizes heat sink technology, ensuring industry-leading heat lumen maintenance (95%). Below are comparison images of the appearance, angles, and light patterns of COB and SMD (Surface Mount Devices). COB offers better visual consistency. Visually, it's clear that hundreds of light-emitting points on the COB board are on the same PCB board, i.e., on the same horizontal plane. Therefore, the light-emitting points are all on the same reference point, resulting in a more uniform light spot. In contrast, SMD components are individually mounted on the PCB board, inevitably resulting in uneven heights and a less uniform light spot, leading to a inferior visual effect compared to COB packaging.
COB offers better light quality.
Traditional SMD packaging involves mounting multiple discrete components on a PCB board to form an LED application. This approach suffers from issues such as point light, glare, and ghosting. COB, on the other hand, is an integrated package, a surface light source, offering not only the advantage of a wider viewing angle (as mentioned in point 1) but also reduced light refraction loss.
COB has an even wider viewing angle.
As can be seen from the light pattern diagram, the viewing angle of Auleda COB full-color is much larger than that of SMD full-color. The viewing angle of SMD full-color is about 110 degrees, while the viewing angle of COB full-color can reach 140-170 degrees without reducing brightness. It also has a wide viewing angle of 140-170 degrees in the vertical angle. These characteristics are particularly advantageous in some applications.
