Infrared "LED"s focused on several locations cause heat only on pot's surface.
Safety: Only pots and pans are heated, by detecting a surface that is totally covered. Hands and fingers poking in, will stop the cooking process.-- pashute, Aug 07 2012 Nuwave http://www.nuwaveoven.com [RayfordSteele, Aug 07 2012] First Issue: True high power infra-red LEDs don't exist. You might be able to find up to one watt, but not much higher than that. Given that your average cooking element is several hundred watts, this isn't going to be real practical. Of course you don't really need LEDs anyway, any infrared source would do.
Second Issue: Heating the pots and pans still results in a hot surface that can burn, so the safety improvement is minimal.-- MechE, Aug 07 2012 Third issue: pots and pans that are shiny and metallic (which many are) are highly reflective to infra-red.-- spidermother, Aug 07 2012 Fourth issue: you can already get infrared hobs. They don't use LEDs (so the efficiency isn't as high), but the waste energy goes into regular hot-type heat, which contributes.-- MaxwellBuchanan, Aug 07 2012 Fifth issue: induction hobs heat only the metal pan.-- MaxwellBuchanan, Aug 07 2012 Nuwave cooker blurb "NuWave Oven automatically cooks on power level HI so there is no need to select the power level unless you want to cook on a lower temperature setting."
Erm, don't other cookers also run at one temperature if you don't turn them up or down?-- not_morrison_rm, Aug 08 2012 I've never seen an oven that doesn't require you to enter a temperature before turning it on. I'm not even sure what the point of that would be, since every single recipe out there that requires baking specifies a temperature to bake at.-- ytk, Aug 08 2012 Quartz heating elements emit infrared. Why do LEDs and heating elements have to be one and the same?-- sanman, Aug 09 2012 random, halfbakery