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George-
 You might try http://www.roithner-laser.com for a german firm that wholesales 
all types of advanced LED's including arrays.
And http://www.lumiled.com for an industrial supplier in the US. Lumiled sells 
them for tail light arrays in cars.

From either you can find the high-brightness LED's and the arrays that are 
used to give better beam spread. The problem is basically that any one LED is 
a pinpoint of light, and they focus it down to about a 10 degree beam spread 
in order to gain brightness in that beam. Compare a tungsten bulb, which has 
equal brightness (more or less) across 360 degrees in two axes and 270 
degrees in the third, and you wind up needing something like 20-40 LED's in 
order to equal a single navigation side light through a reasonable vertical 
range. And that's for small craft brightness.

The exact formula for brightness is in COLREGS. If you take even the 3-mile 
criteria and try to meet it with LED bulbs...Probably $100 at distributor net 
for just the LED's for each sidelight. $500 for a small craft tri-color 
(white is especially pricey) and then you've first got to fabricate it.

There is an LED anchor light for sale in the US, that claims to conserve more 
power by actually blinking the LED's very quickly so only half of them are on 
at a given time. But other LED distributors (not competitors) say this is 
false logic, an LED doesn't gain full brightness when it is blinked that 
rapidly.

Of course on a commercial vessel where the lights run every night and a paid 
crew has to be used to maintain them, the logic of "maintenance free" LED 
lights makes the cost very reasonable. For a small boat with a very tight 
power budget, possibly considerable. But for the rest of us, I'd guess 2-5 
years away.

   

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