We confess that we follow the excellent site All LED Lighting with more than professional interest, because LED lighting is just generally so cool. But today, Keith Dawson’s site carries an announcement of really tiny LEDs designed for use in wearable gear.
The Plessy “dotLEDs” are 1 mm by 0.5 mm, and 0.2 mm thick and produce 0.7 lumens. You could put six or eight of them flat on the head of a pin or 40 of them on edge (for some unknown size pin). A 40 watt incandescent bulb produces 450 lumens, so you’d need about 650 “dotLEDs” to produce equivalent light — far more than than you’d need on a wearable and in not much space. Five thousand dotLEDs weigh less than a penny.
Because these are so small and surface-mounted, they may not be the best choice for craft or hobbyist projects. It will be interesting, though, to see where they turn up and for what applications.