Three Reasons Why Neon Signs Are Better Than Traditional Signage
In the neon signage business, neon signs are lighted electric signs normally illuminated by long pressurised fluorescent tubes containing rarefied gas-discharge lamps with fluorescent bulbs. They're the earliest use of neon lighting, which wasn't really revealed on-line until December 1911 by Georges Claude in the Paris Motor Show. He and his partner-in-crime, Lapace, created what we know today as the first ever Neon Sign. It cost them just pennies on the dollar to create. They showed it at the Salon Communitaire in Paris, and attracted a great crowd.
Neon signs perform two very important roles in the signage business: they allow the sign maker to present a message to a target audience in a way that is easy to understand, and they provide sufficient visibility of the intended message to make it clearly visible to anybody who cares to look. They were first made clear by the invention of the LED, or light-emitting diode, a new invention which makes use of electricity to produce light. LED's are extremely cheap to manufacture and to maintain and use. Once they've been installed, all that's left for the neon signs to do is take the required current from the power supply and send it out into the air. The bulbs used inside the LED's are highly efficient and produce light at a luminous intensity that's a hundred times brighter than ordinary incandescent bulbs, so you'll get a fantastic visibility even at nighttime.
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The first neon signs didn't really have much in the way of design. Just four or five tiny glass tubes with a positively charged tip (at the time, unknown to the sign maker) were taped to a piece of cardboard, so that if a direct current (DC) was applied to the tip, it would cause the glass to 'break' and make a sparkling bright point of light. In order to change this effect, the sign maker would need to purchase a special transformer which could rectify the DC applied to the tip. And that was as far as things went.
The basic principle on which led neon signs operate is quite similar to the one used in semiconductor semiconductors - electric currents can be induced into a conductive material which then absorbs the electrical current. The simplest form of these is the lamp tube, a long thin metal tube filled with gases that has an electric current flowing through it. The electrical current causes the gas to be blown around the edges, producing a colorful glow. If you place a neon sign next to a lamp tube, or even right next to an existing lamp, you'll notice a difference. The sign will glow brighter, and usually longer than the existing lamp.
The reason why traditional neon signs aren't quite as effective as modern LED lights is that the gas required to make them glow isn't easily available. Neon itself is a very heavy gas, so in order to keep the gas from blowing out and producing visible sparks, the edges need to be covered with a thick layer of inert gas. The thin edges of the sign are exposed, and this means that they too have to be covered with the gas. These two factors combined mean that even if you were to buy your own custom made signs from a supplier, the amount you would pay for them would be far higher than what is needed to keep the edges of the sign illuminated. Fortunately though, the cost of LEDs is reducing all the time, and you can now get your hands on them at a fraction of the price!
The advantage of using LED lights in place of classic neon signs lies in the fact that LEDs use a lot less energy. Instead of heating up a glass tube and then driving electricity through it, the current is emitted by a diode. This means that the current is low, making for long lasting and soft lights, which are more suited to indoor lighting than are the traditional neon lights. This also means that LED displays don't produce any 'heat' emissions which heat up your furniture and make your computer work harder. The efficiency of LEDs makes them ideal for use in high volume retail sales centres, where they can light up the entire store for hours on end, but at a fraction of the price you'd have to pay for traditional neon signs.
One of the big drawbacks of using traditional neon signs is that they can only be used in black. Sure, you might be able to change colour when the mood takes you, but you will have to either remove the lamp or wait until it gets dark again before brightening it back up again. This is a big problem for businesses that change their colours often - imagine having to stop work for hours every day just to change the colour of your neon signs! On the other hand, LEDs have no such restriction. You can change colour whenever you like, and even brighten it up during the daytime, something that makes neon signs look rather boring.
Finally, LEDs are much more environmentally friendly than traditional neon signs. While it's true that LEDs produce no CO2 emissions, the current generation emits less than one percent. In comparison, a traditional neon sign releases five times more CO2 than an LED, and puts out even more. By shifting your signage over to LED technology you can greatly reduce your company's environmental impact while still providing your customers with a bright, easy to see sign.