Nope, we're talking about two different manufacturers of LED chips. A lot of these Chinese manufacturers swear that they use 45mil Epistar or Epiled dies. Dunno. Is one brand better than the other? Probably. Worth the price difference? Probably not if you're me, but you should cover your bases by making sure you have proper thermal coupling to your heat sinks, proper sized heat sinks, proper fans if needed, and making sure you run the LED chips themselves within the proper Wattage. As for penetration:
https://www.rollitup.org/led-other-lighting/538173-cheapo-diy-chinese-led-grow-24.html
Pretty darn cool grow if you ask me. He liked the 100W'ers enough to go out and find a better deal on more chips. I guess he was looking at 30W'ers, but already bought/made materials for a panel using 50W chips? Regardless, you can see what he's doing with 150W of LED, and they are (well...
were, I guess, Idk where he is now) flowering quite well, imo. I'd say on par with 150W of HPS? And that's arguably with the wrong spectral distribution. Imagine if that was 150W of custom LED chips with a higher percentage of 700nm-600nm light.
Also -and this might be getting kinda far out there, but here goes nothing- maybe keep in mind that plants aren't very efficient themselves. Some one else has quoted this excerpt from Wikipedia a few times (forgive me for not remembering your name atm):
Stated another way:
100% sunlight → non-bioavailable photons waste is 47%, leaving
53% (in the 400–700 nm range) → 30% of photons are lost due to incomplete absorption, leaving
37% (absorbed photon energy) → 24% is lost due to wavelength-mismatch degradation to 700 nm energy, leaving
28.2% (sunlight energy collected by chlorophyl) → 32% efficient conversion of ATP and NADPH to d-glucose, leaving
9% (collected as sugar) → 35–40% of sugar is recycled/consumed by the leaf in dark and photo-respiration, leaving
5.4% net leaf efficiency.
Now, I have very little understanding of what all that means, but I
do know that "5.4% net leaf efficiency" sounds like a God-awful number to me. I also understand that commercial man-made solar panels are... ~15% efficient on a good day? That's just converting sunlight into electricity, mind you. Now convert that electricity into smokable herb...
I guess what I'm trying to say is not only is there a lot of waste going on here, but there's also many ways to skin a cat. You may have heard this before, but here it is again: It ain't the light, it's the grower. If you can get 50W LED chips for the best W/$ ratio (of course this number should incorporate the $ spent on heat sinks, cool tubes, ballasts, LED drivers, cooling fans, AC units, etc. while assuming each Watt has a sexy spectral distribution according to today's applicable knowledge and also considering upkeep/maintenance costs) then maybe that should be your starting point? But now how do you maximize the amount of light -that you actually generate after a whole slew of other losses not really related to leaf efficiency- that gets turned into bud? Grow bushes not trees?
Dome
Of
Green, not
Screen
Of
Green?
Perhaps the method in which you grow has a larger effect over your gpw than you think. Maybe the difference is larger than even the light source itself? Actually, I can almost guarantee you that my light will not be the bottleneck in my system and that
I will be.