Ask for a quotation and the reply often comes back as: we use Bridgelux chips. That sentence carries far less information than it sounds like it does.
The chain behind one LED package runs like this. A chip maker produces wafers. A packaging house dies, wires, encapsulates and bins them into components. The luminaire factory then mounts those components on an aluminium board.
A brand claim can refer to the chip, the packaging house, or merely being compatible with a brand. All three versions exist in the market, the price difference is around 30 percent, and they look identical from the outside.
What you need to pin down is three things: whose die, whose packaging, and which bin.
On the die side, the names you will meet most are Bridgelux, Epistar, Sanan, Honglitronic and Refond, with Cree, Lumileds and Samsung at the top end. Chinese die makers have improved quickly. For mid-power packages, Sanan and Honglitronic are common and perform adequately. The real difference is usually not the brand. It is the bin.
Binning sorts wafers by flux and chromaticity. The same die in a top bin and a low bin can differ by more than 10 percent in efficacy and by several SDCM steps in colour. That is where the few dollars in a quotation usually come from.
One more point that gets overlooked: which die an LM-80 report actually covers. The report names the model and the case temperature at which it was tested. If your luminaire runs that die at 105°C and the report was run at 55°C, the report does not apply to your product.
In practice, ask the factory for three things: die model and supplier, packaging house name, and the bin code for the batch. When all three line up, quotations become comparable. Bridgelux chip on its own is not a specification. It is a talking point.
We check the materials actually running on the packaging line against the quoted model during factory audits. That tells you more than a showroom sample.