DIY Perks [1] has a good tutorial on how to make a super bright LED panel from LED strips. Quite easily, actually.
Been using one of those in my office for the last eight years or so. I use a server PSU for power.
I was surprised to see how bright it is when I once went outside while it was on. Not only was my window the brightest in the entire street by far. But it actually illuminated the trees around my window.
If I was to build it again - and especially for a place like living room - , I would build it so as to also simulate sunset. That is to say, that it will automatically lower the brightness and shift to a warmer spectrum in the evening. Otherwise, this thing messes with your biorhythm and gets you out of sync with normal daylight hours very quickly.
Yep -- I love this video. The detail he went into on this is remarkable; it taught me a few things about the limits of pretend sunlight as a photographer, and why some pretences work and others don't.
Yudkowsky says he and his wife did it in 2014, so it sounds as if it was actually pretty much at the same time as said prior art.
(Also, they were specifically doing it as a treatment for SAD; I don't think Yudkowsky claims novelty for anything other than the idea that SAD might be effectively treated by having very bright indoor lighting all the time rather than e.g. a lightbox that you sit next to for half an hour a day.)
It's Yudkowsky from LessWrong, he is actually a quite insightful thinker, but his disciples claim stuff like this all the time. LessWrong is an extreme echo chamber.
For me the breaking point was Roko's Basilisk, a self-proclaimed "most-dangerous idea of our time".
Just don't keep working into the night under them, because whoa boy - talk about sleep disruption. Those nice bright lights make it surprisingly easy to work until 6am and not even realize it.
Since you seem to be a heavy user, and if you don’t mind me asking: Has your eye sight deteriorated in those eight years, and how is your sleep quality?
No problems with eyesight. No glasses or anything. I see the light as basically replacing the brightness I would be getting if I wasn’t sitting inside my office instead of outdoors.
And sleep: I don’t have any trouble sleeping, no. But as I mentioned, using a such a bright light in the evening will fuck with your day/night rhythm. If I’m not diligent to turn off those lights at sunset, I’ll easily be working up until two or three in the morning. If that happens, the problem isn’t that I wouldn’t be able to sleep (I will) or that I would sleep badly (I won’t). It’s just that it shifts my rhythm out of sync with everybody else.
Yuji does indeed make the good stuff, just really in a consumer-friendly form factor unless you count the low-power bulbs.
For your sunset approximation, you could add some warmer ones and fade over; they also have some dual-color strips with two different color temperatures evenly spread to allow for seamless mixing.
Exactly. You’d probably need fewer of the warm colored strips, because at the time of day when you will want to use them you’ll also want less light anyway.
I was going to suggest diy perks but thought you were going to link his artificial sun video [1]. I’ve been wanting to build one but not sure where I could fit since it requires a bit more space then a bright led build would.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6bqBsHSwPgw
Jesus Christ. I hadn't actually seen this one. Wow!
You could say he's going overboard in this one, with that fish tank sky simulator thing. But then: How much do we spend on airfare and lodging just to wake up to this kind of light? What an amazing improvement in quality of life this can be.
When I lived in Seattle, my solution was a 2’ square fluorescent panel I got from a gardening supply place called “The Indoor Sun Shop”. I grew up in the South and got real bad seasonal depression up there; it probably saved my life. I paid all of $300 for it. Plus like twenty bucks for a mechanical timer, because I discovered that there were a lot of mornings where I was too depressed and mopey to turn it on myself. I kept it in the home office I worked in and it did a lot to shut up that little voice that suggested killing myself as the solution to every problem.
I wonder how much the traditional British pessimism has to do with the fact our winters are an SAD magnet if there ever was one, very short days due to the high latitude and the kind of grey soul-penetrating dampness of it being just cold enough to make you miserable but not cold enough for the ground to ever properly freeze for long. I definitely found taking vitamin D supplements helps with the seasonal blues, I'd try a daylight simulating lamp but I have quite severe photophobia issues.
there was a post a day or two ago about vitamin D3, as well as academic literature finally catching up to medical science vis a vis vitamin D3.
I won't cite, but only because i don't have a way to index my personal PDF repository, but the common consensus among people who study such things is that anyone living above the 20th parallel (or below, technically) absolutely must supplement vitamin D3, as even a full day in the sun naked is not enough to synthesize the amount of D3 we need.
So with that in mind, I'd honestly expect more people to know this and be supplementing D3. I don't have any specific recommendations, but i do know some guidelines and recent discoveries into "max dosing", so here they are. Anecdotally, i take 5000-6000iu every two days. I have a weird sleeping schedule so i really only notice "a day" as the sort of fog and fatigue i get after having gone more than 30 hours without D3. Prior to about 2015 or so, the max dosage was in the sub-5000iu range, with most supplement's labels stating that 500-1000iu was the "RDA" for D3.
However since covid was exponentially responsible for research into literally anything that could help alleviate symptoms/the disease and accelerate the time to recovery, some doctors were giving extremely high iu, up to 250,000iu over the course of a few days, or single doses of 50,000-80,000iu, with no deleterious effects reported.
Personally, unless i actually get sick, i try to stay under 8000-10000iu, at least until someone does a longitudinal study about the long term effects of doses higher than that.
As to the article and your point about lights helping - i've never noticed anything about any sort of light. I can feel awful at noon on a clear day while outside, or awful inside under every light type imaginable. I'm glad that light (and types of lights) help some people. I just think that the root cause is D3 deficiency, and no amount of 20k lumen arrays is really going to help.
As a quick aside, if you want to supplement children with D3 i recommend finding chewable d3 or a childrens multi-vitamin with omega-3/6 fatty acids. A couple of studies (with decent N and correlations) showed that merely supplementing omegas in children's diets improved the relationship and overall wellbeing of the children's parents - you read me right, parents didn't have to supplement to get the benefits of the children supplementing.
If you are going to supplement D3 over 5000iu, I would recommend getting a 25(OH)D blood test once or twice a year, ideally 2-3 months after each change in dose. Then compare your levels to the levels here and adjust dosage accordingly:
https://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/vitamind-healthprofessiona...
It may also be worth adjusting dosage between winter and summer months, depending on the amount of outdoor activity you do.
All I've heard is the danger of calcium precipitating out of your blood and causing arterial blockages. Apparently D3 potentiates this so that the concentration of blood-borne calcium doesn't need to be as high for this to begin.
I've always been wary of going up to max-dose levels for that reason.
I was taking a lot of vitamin D in Seattle! That took some of the edge off the depression but I still started wanting to kill myself all the time after a couple months of endless grey skies and drizzle, and it came earlier every winter.
The lamp helped for a while but the suicidal urges kept creeping back over the years, until I finally moved back south. The urge to kill myself has pretty much entirely vanished now.
There is, I suspect, no one single cure for seasonal depression. Lights help, massive D3 doses help, vacations in sunnier places help, and there’s probably a ton of other biological factors helped by me living in the sunny place I grew up in versus Seattle.
I'm from India. Lighting in my middle class house, since forever, has been poor. I never consciously felt it when I was still studying. Just that the rooms were dark and I would prefer to play/study outside, or in the front room, where the door was always open, allowing a lot of sunlight.
I realized the lighting factor a few years back. Now, My own home has two lights in every room and whenever I am studying/reading/cooking, I always have them both on.
The difference is stark. Perhaps I am clutching my pearls when I say this, but I feel my quality of life has improved with better lighting.
I also got my walls painted with very light colors, and the ambient light is just amazing.
An interesting question regarding lighting's effect on studying + retaining material + focus ;
Does the entire space need to be well lit - or the object of your focus (which can require the entire scene (such as a lab etc) - but when it comes to reading and computing. If you have a spot on your book or your computer that was of the sun-like quality, (obviously without glare on screens), would that suffice to aid in focus and retention.
I assume that a well lite complete space serves a more biological soothing and depression help.
So it would be interesting to know if there are differing applications of sun-like light based on the goals.
At late actual night, a sun-like spotlight on your focus might be good. When you're up and active, then light the whole space...
For led lighting, 20W (ceiling fittings) for every 100 sf in rooms with light walls provides a lot of illumination in my experience. Can double that for kitchens etc.
This has been applied for decades. Those 'ceiling windows' in art galleries are often false windows with bright daylight lamps beneath it.
By the way, the sun produces ~50.000 lux on earth's surface. That's 100 times more than in a wall illuminated office.
To reach that brightness, you would need tens of kilowatts of LED lightning for medium and larger sized rooms. That's totally infeasible. Also, imagine the heat building up. It will literally be like a greenhouse in your room.
So in reality, no one actually aims for the brightness of the sun. But just something fairly bright at a high ('cool') color temperature. That produces the same sensation.
Many people (including myself) find such brightness levels uncomfortable, and wear sunglasses.
Sunlight is free, but electric light is not. This is why light in my apartment is very bright but not nearly as bright as the streets on a sunny summer day.
Depends on distance. They make e27 screw in LED bulbs that will put out over 5,000 lux but you would need to hold the bulb pretty close to your face to get the full value of it.
I live in Sweden (country with severe darkness) and just bought two Virtual Sun united from https://innerscene.com/
NOTE: Be extremely careful when transporting/moving these units, they easily break. The supplier who imported them on my behalf got two shipments with broken units until they finally got one that wasn't damaged. This happened despite FRAGILE markings on the packaging.
Innerscene's Virtual Sun is much smaller and lighter than the classic Coelux.
Coelux:
Weight: 300 kg (660 lb)
Dimensions: 2375 x 1675 x 691 mm (93.5 x 65.9 x 27.2")
Innerscene Virtual Sun:
Weight: 39 kg (85.8 lbs)
Dimensions: 1001 x 514 x 255 mm (39 7/16 x 20 1/4 x 10")
Did you take any pictures of the inner workings of the broken ones by chance? I'm curious if there are any hints about how they work, or the Coelux ones.
> Someone should probably start a bright home lighting company
Such a thing already exists. Its called a lighting design company.
People need to admit that lighting (like cryptography) is hard, and that if you're serious about "doing it right" you need to bring in a suitably skilled professional.
Each house/apartment is different and every room within it is different, you'll never be able to magically buy good lighting out of the box to be installed on a plug and play basis.
So if you are already undergoing the expense of a full-refurb and are serious about getting the lighting right, then really you should throw a few coins in the direction of a lighting professional.
I went this route on a home renovation and it was worth every penny. I’m overly picky about lighting in general. Temperature, direction, intensity, and especially shadows. I was recently at a friends house that did a remodel and while plating my food in their kitchen my own shadow was cast on my plate and the food in front of me on their countertop. I felt so odd like a mild inconvenience I forgot existed. I told him jokingly he needs a refund from his contractor.
There are loads of products on the market that are intended to deliver short bursts of light to you. Usually they are marketed under the name "bright light" or "daylight" lamp. The point with light is that the intensity drops quadratic with distance. So, most of these solutions are intended to be used close to your face. The further away they are from you, the more energy you need. So, a wall or ceiling mounted solution is more costly.
I used to live in Finland where the winters are dark and long and lots of my colleagues had these in their offices. The first time I saw one (a Philipps bright light), I thought it was some kind of fancy new Apple device I did not know yet. Until they turned it on. Highly effective apparently in countering winter depression, which is a common thing that far North.
Basically you use them for 30 minutes or so in the morning. You actually need to be careful with this as you can damage your eyes. I checked on Amazon and you can get loads of different products in this category for under 50 euro or pay a premium for something bigger/fancier. E.g. Beurer has an ipad sized 10K lux solution: https://www.amazon.de/-/en/daylight-simulation-intensity-dis.... I can't vouch for any of these products since I don't need or use them though.
Personally, I prefer to just take a walk when my calendar permits. It's good for multiple reasons and also re-energizes me while lowering stress. Just a 45 minute stroll does wonders; I do longer walks when time permits as well. I live in Germany these days so, it's less dark in the winter here and it did not really affect me that much even when I was living in Finland. I noticed my colleagues from further south were suffering a lot more; or at least moaning more about it.
Can confirm. Have worked on so many extremely large scale construction projects, on the tech side, and I see all the lighting plans during the design process...
And I am always dumbfounded when I see the actual results. Even back when software available today, Blender, Sketchup and other design software did not exist ; lighting designers were REALLY good at coming up with nice lighting designs...
Now with the advent of these tools, lighting design today is lightyears from where it was a decade ago - but its still HARD to do well.
> For me the article is missing an explanation of why existing artificial skylights cost $30k, and how to avoid those costs.
Because people with rare diseases are willing to pay a lot of money for stuff sold by snake-oil peddlers after they have been let down by the traditional healthcare system, and other than people with SAD there's not much of a market for these things.
People already spend thousands of dollars on skylights without any professional lighting design, yet they pay a professional draughtsman to design it specially for their house, council to approve it, and licensed tradesman to build it. I don't get why they don't spend those same thousands on what you suggest or an off-the-shelf product that an electrician (or DIY) can install.
There are many aquarium lighting companies that make these types of fixtures, because this intensity of lighting is exactly what people want to (and do) simulate over their aquariums (though generally at spectrums that are bluer than daylight)!
I think in terms of cost what the OP is not realizing is that when you are talking about hundreds of watts of LEDs, that is a lot of heat that is very concentrated. It takes a thoughtful design and active cooling to ensure the fixture is safe and the LEDs are kept at the proper temperates to maximize their life and performance. You don't really need to worry about active cooling when you have a few low wattage LED bulbs spread throughout a room. But cram a ton of them together in a small area and you absolutely do.
As you can see, heat management is a prime feature of these lights, and the quality in general is absolutely amazing (it’s priced accordingly, though).
I used "rails lights" (the kind they often use in boutiques) and pointed them up at the ceiling (rails are mounted on walls, not the ceiling). There is almost nowhere in the apartment where you can look directly at a light source. The result: bright but pleasantly diffused light.
Very cool. I had considered something like this: install "crown moulding" a few inches shy of the ceiling and running rope lighting along where it will not be seen — but can scatter across the ceiling.
"Warmth" and "naturalness" are produced by high CRI index (90+).
I have 8 lamps with CRI 90+ in my living room, at 5000K color temperature, 1500 lumens each. They produce nice light that seamlessly mixes with daytime sunlight from the window: they seem to have the same color.
I also have a few LED strip installation over desks and tables, very bright at max dimmer setting. A diffuser is a must, even though it lowers the brightness noticeably. Without it, anything moderately shiny will reflect painfully bright dots of light.
1) Most modern LEDs are surprisingly good for being sun-colored. It's luck-of-the-draw, though. I once bought some very expensive CFL bulbs from B&H, rated as 90+CRI, and they were literally tritone. I bought some bottom-of-the-barrel LED bulbs at Walmart, and they were great (until they started failing a few months later).
2) You can test this yourself with a $1 pair of diffraction glasses. They're sold as "3d" or "rainbow" or similar kids toys at dollar stores, or with a shipping markup Fleabay.
3) Diffuser is important, but it's also possible to just install many bulbs all around.
4) Consistency is important. If your hallway feels dimmer or brighter than your room, it's not great.
5) Changing color temperature is nice.
I don't think there's a business model here, though. This stuff isn't expensive, but most of the cost is educating the customer. Once a customer is educated, they can do the same thing themselves without your help (even with cheap Walmart lights).
The market is flooded with fakes and shittily QA'd products (often under previously good brand names) - having a turnkey solution with guaranteed quality would have a lot of buyers, and there is a lot of potential to grow a new solid brand.
If you do, please don't sell to private equity right away. Let us all get a couple years of a real solid product at least.
I'm still pissed at the (well known brand) USB stick I bought (marked high speed!) due to shitty engineering would overheat on any transfer longer than about 10 seconds, then throttle to KB/s read/write speed. Average speed was 1.5MB/s.
You should try with a short arc xenon bulb like the Osram XBO series. They are among other things used architecturally for emulating daylight inside buildings.
Downside is you need a 70A 28V power supply and a semi-massive cooling system. And bulb lifetime is approx. 1 year of normal use.
Readit News
Been using one of those in my office for the last eight years or so. I use a server PSU for power.
I was surprised to see how bright it is when I once went outside while it was on. Not only was my window the brightest in the entire street by far. But it actually illuminated the trees around my window.
If I was to build it again - and especially for a place like living room - , I would build it so as to also simulate sunset. That is to say, that it will automatically lower the brightness and shift to a warmer spectrum in the evening. Otherwise, this thing messes with your biorhythm and gets you out of sync with normal daylight hours very quickly.
[1] https://youtu.be/jLia59KfkSw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBV-1VNWscA
> Been using one of those in my office for the last eight years or so. I use a server PSU for power.
And as you mention, articles on it have been circulating for even longer.
(Also, they were specifically doing it as a treatment for SAD; I don't think Yudkowsky claims novelty for anything other than the idea that SAD might be effectively treated by having very bright indoor lighting all the time rather than e.g. a lightbox that you sit next to for half an hour a day.)
For me the breaking point was Roko's Basilisk, a self-proclaimed "most-dangerous idea of our time".
$20 each, https://www.harborfreight.com/5000-lumen-4-ft-led-hanging-sh... 5k lumens, 60w
I also came to post the DIY perks video about simulated sunlight, the effect of parallel rays really changes the geometric mood of the room.
Just don't keep working into the night under them, because whoa boy - talk about sleep disruption. Those nice bright lights make it surprisingly easy to work until 6am and not even realize it.
And sleep: I don’t have any trouble sleeping, no. But as I mentioned, using a such a bright light in the evening will fuck with your day/night rhythm. If I’m not diligent to turn off those lights at sunset, I’ll easily be working up until two or three in the morning. If that happens, the problem isn’t that I wouldn’t be able to sleep (I will) or that I would sleep badly (I won’t). It’s just that it shifts my rhythm out of sync with everybody else.
For your sunset approximation, you could add some warmer ones and fade over; they also have some dual-color strips with two different color temperatures evenly spread to allow for seamless mixing.
You could say he's going overboard in this one, with that fish tank sky simulator thing. But then: How much do we spend on airfare and lodging just to wake up to this kind of light? What an amazing improvement in quality of life this can be.
Thanks for sharing this one!
I won't cite, but only because i don't have a way to index my personal PDF repository, but the common consensus among people who study such things is that anyone living above the 20th parallel (or below, technically) absolutely must supplement vitamin D3, as even a full day in the sun naked is not enough to synthesize the amount of D3 we need.
So with that in mind, I'd honestly expect more people to know this and be supplementing D3. I don't have any specific recommendations, but i do know some guidelines and recent discoveries into "max dosing", so here they are. Anecdotally, i take 5000-6000iu every two days. I have a weird sleeping schedule so i really only notice "a day" as the sort of fog and fatigue i get after having gone more than 30 hours without D3. Prior to about 2015 or so, the max dosage was in the sub-5000iu range, with most supplement's labels stating that 500-1000iu was the "RDA" for D3.
However since covid was exponentially responsible for research into literally anything that could help alleviate symptoms/the disease and accelerate the time to recovery, some doctors were giving extremely high iu, up to 250,000iu over the course of a few days, or single doses of 50,000-80,000iu, with no deleterious effects reported.
Personally, unless i actually get sick, i try to stay under 8000-10000iu, at least until someone does a longitudinal study about the long term effects of doses higher than that.
As to the article and your point about lights helping - i've never noticed anything about any sort of light. I can feel awful at noon on a clear day while outside, or awful inside under every light type imaginable. I'm glad that light (and types of lights) help some people. I just think that the root cause is D3 deficiency, and no amount of 20k lumen arrays is really going to help.
As a quick aside, if you want to supplement children with D3 i recommend finding chewable d3 or a childrens multi-vitamin with omega-3/6 fatty acids. A couple of studies (with decent N and correlations) showed that merely supplementing omegas in children's diets improved the relationship and overall wellbeing of the children's parents - you read me right, parents didn't have to supplement to get the benefits of the children supplementing.
It may also be worth adjusting dosage between winter and summer months, depending on the amount of outdoor activity you do.
I've always been wary of going up to max-dose levels for that reason.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/20th_parallel_north
The lamp helped for a while but the suicidal urges kept creeping back over the years, until I finally moved back south. The urge to kill myself has pretty much entirely vanished now.
There is, I suspect, no one single cure for seasonal depression. Lights help, massive D3 doses help, vacations in sunnier places help, and there’s probably a ton of other biological factors helped by me living in the sunny place I grew up in versus Seattle.
I realized the lighting factor a few years back. Now, My own home has two lights in every room and whenever I am studying/reading/cooking, I always have them both on.
The difference is stark. Perhaps I am clutching my pearls when I say this, but I feel my quality of life has improved with better lighting.
I also got my walls painted with very light colors, and the ambient light is just amazing.
Good lighting is a blessing.
Does the entire space need to be well lit - or the object of your focus (which can require the entire scene (such as a lab etc) - but when it comes to reading and computing. If you have a spot on your book or your computer that was of the sun-like quality, (obviously without glare on screens), would that suffice to aid in focus and retention.
I assume that a well lite complete space serves a more biological soothing and depression help.
So it would be interesting to know if there are differing applications of sun-like light based on the goals.
At late actual night, a sun-like spotlight on your focus might be good. When you're up and active, then light the whole space...
For led lighting, 20W (ceiling fittings) for every 100 sf in rooms with light walls provides a lot of illumination in my experience. Can double that for kitchens etc.
By the way, the sun produces ~50.000 lux on earth's surface. That's 100 times more than in a wall illuminated office. To reach that brightness, you would need tens of kilowatts of LED lightning for medium and larger sized rooms. That's totally infeasible. Also, imagine the heat building up. It will literally be like a greenhouse in your room. So in reality, no one actually aims for the brightness of the sun. But just something fairly bright at a high ('cool') color temperature. That produces the same sensation.
Sunlight is free, but electric light is not. This is why light in my apartment is very bright but not nearly as bright as the streets on a sunny summer day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminous_efficiency_function
You could achieve that with 750W of LEDs. Of course, that is still quite a lot of power.
NOTE: Be extremely careful when transporting/moving these units, they easily break. The supplier who imported them on my behalf got two shipments with broken units until they finally got one that wasn't damaged. This happened despite FRAGILE markings on the packaging.
Innerscene's Virtual Sun is much smaller and lighter than the classic Coelux.
I paid 89239 SEK (~9349 USD) +25% VAT = 111549 SEK (~11685 USD) per unit.
Not sure about the VAT rate if buying from US.
Hopefully they have reduced the prices since then, not sure.
Such a thing already exists. Its called a lighting design company.
People need to admit that lighting (like cryptography) is hard, and that if you're serious about "doing it right" you need to bring in a suitably skilled professional.
Each house/apartment is different and every room within it is different, you'll never be able to magically buy good lighting out of the box to be installed on a plug and play basis.
So if you are already undergoing the expense of a full-refurb and are serious about getting the lighting right, then really you should throw a few coins in the direction of a lighting professional.
I used to live in Finland where the winters are dark and long and lots of my colleagues had these in their offices. The first time I saw one (a Philipps bright light), I thought it was some kind of fancy new Apple device I did not know yet. Until they turned it on. Highly effective apparently in countering winter depression, which is a common thing that far North.
Basically you use them for 30 minutes or so in the morning. You actually need to be careful with this as you can damage your eyes. I checked on Amazon and you can get loads of different products in this category for under 50 euro or pay a premium for something bigger/fancier. E.g. Beurer has an ipad sized 10K lux solution: https://www.amazon.de/-/en/daylight-simulation-intensity-dis.... I can't vouch for any of these products since I don't need or use them though.
Personally, I prefer to just take a walk when my calendar permits. It's good for multiple reasons and also re-energizes me while lowering stress. Just a 45 minute stroll does wonders; I do longer walks when time permits as well. I live in Germany these days so, it's less dark in the winter here and it did not really affect me that much even when I was living in Finland. I noticed my colleagues from further south were suffering a lot more; or at least moaning more about it.
And I am always dumbfounded when I see the actual results. Even back when software available today, Blender, Sketchup and other design software did not exist ; lighting designers were REALLY good at coming up with nice lighting designs...
Now with the advent of these tools, lighting design today is lightyears from where it was a decade ago - but its still HARD to do well.
Because people with rare diseases are willing to pay a lot of money for stuff sold by snake-oil peddlers after they have been let down by the traditional healthcare system, and other than people with SAD there's not much of a market for these things.
One point that stood out is that effective and safe lighting is as much, or more, about contrast than any absolute spot lighting levels.
I think in terms of cost what the OP is not realizing is that when you are talking about hundreds of watts of LEDs, that is a lot of heat that is very concentrated. It takes a thoughtful design and active cooling to ensure the fixture is safe and the LEDs are kept at the proper temperates to maximize their life and performance. You don't really need to worry about active cooling when you have a few low wattage LED bulbs spread throughout a room. But cram a ton of them together in a small area and you absolutely do.
As you can see, heat management is a prime feature of these lights, and the quality in general is absolutely amazing (it’s priced accordingly, though).
The light was blindingly bright to look at and it looks very strange in a room.
My takeaway was:
* that you need some type of diffuser.
* The light leak out of the apartment was crazy. My apartment looked completely insane from the street.
* The light warmth is very important. And proper sun coloured lamps don't exist or are crazy expensive.
I have 8 lamps with CRI 90+ in my living room, at 5000K color temperature, 1500 lumens each. They produce nice light that seamlessly mixes with daytime sunlight from the window: they seem to have the same color.
I also have a few LED strip installation over desks and tables, very bright at max dimmer setting. A diffuser is a must, even though it lowers the brightness noticeably. Without it, anything moderately shiny will reflect painfully bright dots of light.
<90: Crap
90-95: Can be ok, or not. Depends. Different lights will likely not mix at the same color temperature.
98: Good
99-100 full spectrum cyberlight: As good as Halogen and only ~30x as expensive.
1) Most modern LEDs are surprisingly good for being sun-colored. It's luck-of-the-draw, though. I once bought some very expensive CFL bulbs from B&H, rated as 90+CRI, and they were literally tritone. I bought some bottom-of-the-barrel LED bulbs at Walmart, and they were great (until they started failing a few months later).
2) You can test this yourself with a $1 pair of diffraction glasses. They're sold as "3d" or "rainbow" or similar kids toys at dollar stores, or with a shipping markup Fleabay.
3) Diffuser is important, but it's also possible to just install many bulbs all around.
4) Consistency is important. If your hallway feels dimmer or brighter than your room, it's not great.
5) Changing color temperature is nice.
I don't think there's a business model here, though. This stuff isn't expensive, but most of the cost is educating the customer. Once a customer is educated, they can do the same thing themselves without your help (even with cheap Walmart lights).
If you do, please don't sell to private equity right away. Let us all get a couple years of a real solid product at least.
I'm still pissed at the (well known brand) USB stick I bought (marked high speed!) due to shitty engineering would overheat on any transfer longer than about 10 seconds, then throttle to KB/s read/write speed. Average speed was 1.5MB/s.
I'm reading between the lines here: I think you want to see as continuous a spectrum as is possible with LEDs, not three discrete bands (R, G, B)?
I know LED are not spectrally continuous like incandescent (black body) radiation. Maybe the phosphor coating excites in a more continuous spectrum?
> I don't think there's a business model here, though.
I disagree. I would pay a premium if a company could offer a line that hit the mark on all points: temperature, brightness, spectrum, non-flickering.
My alternatives today appear to be a kind of roulette. And a lot of money is wasted at roulette....
Downside is you need a 70A 28V power supply and a semi-massive cooling system. And bulb lifetime is approx. 1 year of normal use.