There's a lot wrong with LEDs in general and retrofit (E27 bulbs) in particular. In no particular order
- LED emitters driven hard for cost reasons, age and fail quickly
- Power supplies driven hard for cost reasons, age and fail quickly
- Poor CRI and SSRI
- Flickering
- Dim-to-warm is uncommon
- Poorly designed power supplies that age and fail quickly
- The same light quality is vastly more expensive to achieve with LEDs, even if you account for high electricity prices. Good indoor lighting is now something only people with plenty of disposable income can afford.
- It is quite difficult to even buy high quality LEDs as a mere mortal
- Retrofits generally work poorly on principle
- LEDs mix exceptionally poorly, making things even more expensive
$3.45 for a very nice, ~2000lm 97 CRI LED, about 99 lm/W. (Efficiency goes up quite a bit if you settle for 90 CRI.)
So that gives about 2000lm at about 25W, for <$30.
Wikipedia gives about 16 lm/W for incandescent, so 125W. At 10 hour per day, the LED options pays for itself quickly even at national average prices. In CA, it’s very fast.
To be fair, for high-end LEDs like this, the balance of the system is more expensive, because you need a heat sink. Incandescent lamps run very hot and don’t need heat sinks.
I think this is potentially promising, but I don’t think you can buy it:
This is just an anecdote, but I’ve had multiple “10 year” LED bulbs fail after just a year or two. I suspect much of the claims for these bulbs are theoretical as they just don’t hold up, probably for reasons the grandparent poster is pointing out.
Your comment is just regurgitating tech specs. In reality, the bulbs that are at hand vary so much in quality, that tech spec discussions are almost useless. The flickering is a real issue. I'm not aware of any standard way of rating the flickering of LED bulbs; they can vary from really bad (literally dark 50% of the duty cycle because one stupid diode) to decent (bidirectional diodes), to very good (full voltage regulator).
Sadly, with San Fran anywhere from 4.5x, or more than where I live (Quebec), and with LED products lastly barely longer than incandescent bulbs, it is typically a loss.
Maybe a 5 year warranty on LED bulbs should be a law, to ensure better quality control and build. The competitors can compete around that requirement.
Where exactly would you mount a light like the one you linked?
10 hours per day sounds like a crazy amount of time to use a light. I think we use some lights in our house maybe 4 hours per day on average max. Maybe I just have a lot of windows and don't live in Alaska in the winter.
As an amateur EE, I have analysed some of LEDs when I wanted to light up my kitchen counters. I wanted flicker-free LEDs with high CRI and temperature matching the rest of my apartment.
I ordered samples of a lot of LEDs and found that almost all of them are using their parts, especially capacitors, well above the specs.
Driving caps at well above their specs, at high temperature, basically ensures speedy failure. Not only that, but undersized smoothing capacitor causes visible 100Hz flicker.
What's even more interesting is at the price point putting better caps was almost inconsequential to the price of the product. I have ordered capacitors that should have been there in the first place and replaced the original ones with the new ones. Not only LEDs are flicker free now, I suspect they will be serving me for much longer.
>almost all of them are using their parts, especially capacitors, well above the specs
Well, the LEDs themselves will last up to 20 years, so they have to make something in the bulb fail before that. Can't have people only buying replacement bulbs every other decade.
> There's a lot wrong with LEDs in general and retrofit (E27 bulbs) in particular. In no particular order
If all that's true, it explains my experience that LEDs have totally failed to live up to their promise. Sure, they use less power than incandescents, but they're far more expensive and also more finicky. They were supposed to last a decade, but I'm lucky if I get a year or two out of them. I wonder what the environmental impact is when you factor in e-waste and manufacturing costs.
About the only clear win for me is they run much cooler, which is nice when you have underpowered AC (or no AC).
> - LEDs mix exceptionally poorly, making things even more expensive
I'm not sure exactly what you mean here, but (compared to incandescents), different models of LED differ significantly in light characteristics and start up time. More than once I've had to replace all the bulbs in a fixture, because I couldn't buy and equivalent replacement for one that failed.
They've started marking LED bulbs as "not for enclosed fixtures" which is .... 90% of existing fixtures?
They overheat and die really fast if used in something that's not vented/cooled. You need fixtures that fully expose the bulb so it doesn't burn itself out.
Amusing that LED bulbs, the energy savers, die from excess heat.
So having a minimum CRI of 80-90 is a good starting point, there are issues with the CRI measure itself:
> Ra is the average value of R1–R8; other values from R9 to R15 are not used in the calculation of Ra, including R9 "saturated red", R13 "skin color (light)", and R15 "skin color (medium)", which are all difficult colors to faithfully reproduce. R9 is a vital index in high-CRI lighting, as many applications require red lights, such as film and video lighting, medical lighting, art lighting, etc. However, in the general CRI (Ra) calculation R9 is not included.
It is interesting you cite that the cost has went up for lighting. Where I live the government owned utility often raises their rates per kwHr. One of the reasons they cite is the increase in efficiency leading to a drop in revenue each year.
The same utility pays for those efficiency projects.
My network and kWh cost are split and the network cost have risen far less than kWh cost. Also the network cost are constant. Looking at where those are used for the main cost are in peak usage capacity which efficiency actually lowers.
On my first read of this, it makes sense though. The mileage of infrastructure is the same regardless of use. Those powerlines still need maintenance even if LEDs are making homes more efficient.
What’s an example of what you consider to be a high quality led? I’m pretty happy with everything that I have in my home but I’m curious what you’re talking about
Ketra was good, smart bulbs like Hue with an open API, but far better than Hue. Lutron bought them, killed the API and and proceeded to require inferior and costly priority controls
I didn't hit many of these issues (our house has 100% LED bulbs, from different manufacturers).
I made sure they were all the same color temperature, and also all >> 90 CRI.
The main issue I've seen is that dimmer switches are usually not compatible with the electronics in high-end fixtures, and that high-end fixtures often take a long time to power on. (Like, walk across the room and open the fridge amounts of time.)
They should choose a standard way of dimming bulbs that doesn't result in noticeable 60hz flicker, and that dictates a max 100ms turn on latency, then ban the sale of "dimmer compatible" LED bulbs, or "LED compatible" dimmer switches that are not compliant with that standard.
Also, bulb reliability should be tracked, and any product with a > 5% failure rate in the first 5 years should either be banned, or the company should have to put replacement funds into escrow.
(Current bulbs have a ~ 5-10% failure rate from what I've seen.)
Yeah, I love Alec's Technology Connections video on some bulbs with that feature, but he pointed it partly because some of the few bulbs that offered it seemed to be getting phased out.
Its much like a bunch of other points on the list. There are a fair few that would only add a small amount of additional cost, but because the companies can save money by not doing it, they don't.
It does not actually cost all that much more to add a few more diodes, to avoid severely overdriving the ones on the board, or to improve the power supply circuitry so that it will likely last longer.
But it really sucks that even if you chose to buy the more premium tier bulbs being offered at the big box store, they often don't fix some of these issues. They may have a better CRI, but are still often overdriven, with questionable power supply designs.
Primarily it is the E27 bulbs that are the problem. Designed to ease people into simple replacement into the old light sockets 10+ years ago. Now in 2023 the new LED products with the well designed power supplies work much better and efficiency. The author mentions renovations, but still using ancient fixtures, wiring and switches. A new house, or partial renovation, should now be wired with 24v for all wall and ceiling lights.
The same topic about LEDs has so many entries on HN in the recent years. I have posted about it a lot. To add to the list
- low power factor (usually 50%).
- cheap passives, caps/coils
- terrible heat dissipation, e27/e14 are no good target, but see overdriven again
- close to no input protection (see power supplies, again), so motors totally wreck them with their induction kickback
OTOH, constant (not over)driven LEDs with dedicated power supplies (pref. isolated, so safer), with decent area, aluminum PCBs can last long.
A cheap advice if you have to buy a retrofit LED bulb, buy the heaviest one, i.e. get a scale with (at least) gram precision and weight them. More mass - better heat dissipation, better passives.
We're mostly on the same page, but there are some caveats to buying the heavier bulbs, even assuming the weight is all heat sink- because that won't matter if the heated air has no where to go!
An expensive bulb with a nice heat sink will fail just as quickly as a cheap one when you put it in a well-sealed can light or something else that traps all the hot air.
Simpler and better light, but bad energy efficiency.
Although, as was pointed out to me at some point, because LEDs are more efficient, people feel less guilty about having more of them; replacing 1x40 watt bulb with 8x5 watt LEDs means the net result is the same. I've got like 7 cute LED spotlights in my TV closet for example, I wouldn't have had that setup if I was forced to use incandescent lamps.
Maybe I am missing something from this conversation, but all of my LED bulbs produce far _less_ heat than incandescent bulbs. The lamp in my bedroom no longer keeps me warm!
I've moved three times with one set of cheap LED bulbs without having to replace a single one. I'd have gone thorough dozens of incandescent bulbs in the same time period. I'd have also burned my hand on a few.
LEDs are definitely simpler than incandescent from a user perspective.
- LED emitters driven hard for cost reasons, age and fail quickly
- Power supplies driven hard for cost reasons, age and fail quickly
- Poorly designed power supplies that age and fail quickly
These are all features from the producers POV. Planned obsolescence.
- Poor CRI and SSRI
This is true for all cheap lights, you gotta pay for that.
I replaced nearly all bulps with WiZ bulps more than 2 years ago.
- I don't see flicker on any of my cameras. The light is actually really nice for filming too.
- The price is way less than hue (I own a few, and don't think they are any better)
- I get way more light per watt than with any other bulp type. Not sure what you mean with luxury.
- I love that each of them has an independent API on their own IP. Works perfectly for my smart home design.
I've had several cheap (in build quality, not price) bulps fail on me meanwhile. Not a single WiZ had failed so far. As said I own some hue too, but I wasn't willing to spend over $1000 just on bulps for my house but then I found the WiZ brand.
Not sure if am just lucky. But I really enjoy multicolour plus warm and cold LEDs in the whole house.
There are YouTube channels dedicated to repairing non-functional LED bulbs. In every case the issue is usually that one of n leds has failed, and if you solder a bypass then the remaining leds work fine. After that the only real problem is that all the adhesives used in the construction of the bulb more or less require that you destroy the bulb in order to get to the point you can repair or bypass the one LED.
I wanted to upgrade the super faint positional lights in my two garage openers, and I need to stay <= 10W, so I tried some LEDs. But they kill the 433 MHz remote signal, sadly. Tried 3 different brands, a couple of which don't actually fully turn off, or give off a loud hum to boot.
The openers use rear car light bulbs, for some reason (BA15s).
How much of this is driven by the actual cost of properly provisioning emitters and fielding a good power supply vs the inability of consumers to hold manufacturers accountable?
Does the average person remember the brand of lightbulb they purchased at Walmart or the hardware store? I would hope the buyers at stores would have better sense to buy half decent brand vs utter trash available through 3rd party sellers online. Not much hope though.
> - It is quite difficult to even buy high quality LEDs as a mere mortal
I'm going through this again now. At one point I found Philips EyeComfort bulbs on Amazon which checked all my boxes (2700-3000K, 60W, dimmable, almost non-existent flicker). I've had a couple bulbs die on me now, and I cannot for the life of me find replacements, it's like they stopped manufacturing them. I have no clue what to replace them with now
> The same light quality is vastly more expensive to achieve with LEDs, even if you account for high electricity prices. Good indoor lighting is now something only people with plenty of disposable income can afford.
Where? How? I can no longer buy quality LED lighting at any price. I have a bunch of Sylvania Ultra Sunset Effects bulbs purchased ~15 years or so ago that nothing since even comes close to.
At the limits of their ratings. They could make LED bulbs last many orders of magnitude longer and be more efficient, but they don't (unless forced to[1]) because they prefer planned obsolescence.
Placed under operating conditions very close to their specified limits.
Like if you were to drive your car in 2nd gear on the freeway, at 6000rpm.
The engine would wear out much quicker than if you drove in 5th gear, at 1500rpm.
100 years of training make most people think of light bulbs as a trivial purchase. And now a product that cost $0.50 20 years ago is $10, and often performs worse for its purpose.
So the economics just drive cost down no matter what. And even a picky consumer is hard pressed to get what he wants when you go to the bulb aisle at Lowe’s. They literally went from 10 SKUs to 250, with no meaningful standards.
I agree on most point but dim to warm is pretty undesirable in my point of view. I'd like to just be able to set the color temperature independently of brightness. Which I can do with my zigbee lights.
I have every single light bulb in my house (and outside my house) as an LED RGB Alexa-addressible light, and I love it.
"Set all the lights to red" and every single bulb in my house and porch and walkway and garage etc, all turn red.
"Turn on/off all the light"
Set kitchen to firebrick...
Etc.
I LOVE IT.
During the day I rarely have any lights on at all - but at night I have precise control over every bulb in my house with alexa voice.
I initially would never have put alexa in my home, but now that I have it and all bulbs on it, as well as several alexa-fied power outlets, its just a very nice thing to have.
Im not too concerned over "lighting quality" - as I get exactly what I want.
The bulbs I bought were from Costco, where they had them on sale for $5 for a (2) pack. so I replaced all CFLs with RGB Wifi LEDs with alexa, and it was ~$70 to do the whole house (27) bulbs.
EDIT: Dimmability "Alexa Set Kitchen to 10%" --> I can dim or brighten all the lights at once "Alexa set house to 100%" etc...
Add to that spiky spectrum. Incandescent bulbs give black body radiation, a solid spectrum. Regular LED lights spike in RGB to achieve a neutral color. Can cause metamerism in photos and just looks bad IMO.
A bunch of this is driven by power efficiency requirements, creating a flickering low quality mess. Like no-flicker LED lights usually have a worse power factor.
A bulb gets a burst of power every 120Hz, so it would only use about .075 joules per cycle. Half the time is spent above 110v, and half is under 110v, so we need to store less than 1/240th of a second of power to have a perfect output and a perfect power factor.
Let's put a capacitor before the regulator to store that power, and design the regulator to compensate for how the voltage will vary over each cycle. Since we don't want to drain our capacitor entirely, let's spec it for .05 joules at 100v, which means 10µF.
Digikey says a 10µF 200v capacitor costs ten cents.
If there's flicker, I blame the voltage regulator or lack thereof, not the requirement of power efficiency.
Everybody already knows these things. Like, why do democrats (not politicians, I mean you people) have a need to enact new regulations everytime they get a chance?
A misspelling of "SSI", Spectral Similarity Index, another color accuracy metric.
Basically the industry figured out how to win at the CRI game without actually creating the same underlying spectral distribution of light. So they same up with another metric to try to optimize called SSI (also TLCI, etc.) SSI is mostly relevant in the digital cinema space, where the observer is a digital camera, not a human eye, as they can't be tricked the same way because they have different underlying RGB spectral sensitivities.
The irony of this article is that the author is suffering from “too much choice”. LEDs have so much more capability than fluorescent and halogen bulbs that the burden has fallen on the consumer to sort out what dimmability, temperature, and lumens they need. It used to be that you only had one option so you didn’t have to think about it.
Anyone who works in stage lighting or art knows that light is complicated. We should not fault the technology for now giving us too many options, but instead improve the branding and advertising.
I actually am opposed to bans on traditional incandescent bulbs but vastly prefer LEDs and have no desire to go back to them.
Using LEDs was a shock to me initially mostly because, as you point out, with traditional household incandescents there wasn't a whole lot of options. So suddenly when I had to pay attention to color profiles and so forth more carefully, I wasn't expecting it.
But I don't see that as a bad thing, I really love all the options, and the better precision in labeling color versus power versus brightness.
One problem I've noted, that others in the thread are pointing to, is that a lot of shoddy manufacturing has taken advantage of many of the claims of LED technology to push unacceptable products. One of my pet peeves is how I've suddenly seen fixtures with integrated bulbs take over lighting departments, poorly constructed and forcing you to remove the entire fixture rather than just the bulb, when it dies after a year, much earlier than promised. But I guess even there it's just moved me to more selective lighting stores where I can still buy better fixtures separately from the bulbs.
I do think there's something to be said about declines or fraud in lightbulb manufacturing quality compared to what is possible, but I see that as a scourge of our age and not something unique to LEDs. I have as much trouble finding a quality lightbulb as I do a quality pair of pants.
> I actually am opposed to bans on traditional incandescent bulbs
AFAIK, there are no simple bans on them [ EDIT: in the USA ]. What exists are energy performance standards, which these bulbs do not meet. If you want, you can say that this is nit-picking, and that of course that's a ban.
But when we have energy performance standards for, say, cars, nobody says it is a ban on cars, just a effective end to the production of inefficient ones.
So far I've had better experiences with integrated lighting than individual bulbs. Normally the integrated lighting means they've got more space to try and cram things like power supplies in there and can use a lot of the actual fixture to cool down the electronics. Meanwhile, fixtures designed to not care about the bulbs getting hot roast the LED bulbs and can cause early failure.
I've had very good luck with the integrated fixtures. I have a number of them in my house and only one has failed (of maybe a dozen). This is a lot lower than the failure rate of LED bulbs. They are far brighter than the lights they replaced, and I personally like their lower profile. I also installed a number of the integrated fixtures in my father's house, and the increased brightness helps him quite a bit (he's 80).
On the other hand, the integrated bulb/fixtures in our house at least use separate driver units, and seem to be lasting much better than the average mains-voltage LED bulb (the oldest is 8 years old, used every day and still going strong, touch wood).
It is quite interesting that 2700K is often considered to be a "normal" color temperature, even though it is much yellower than sunlight (around 5000K, depending on atmospheric scattering). This stems purely from a technological limitation of incandescent bulbs. The bulb filaments simply cannot withstand a temperature significantly above 2700K. Even though LED bulbs have no such limitations, a color temperature of only 2700K is often chosen.
There is another benefit to <3000K indoor lighting: lighting is usually used in the evening, close to bed time. So a warmer light helps with people's circadian rhythm in preparing for sleep. Remember that light at sunset also becomes warmer.
If all your indoor lighting was 5000K, then it would be like you would be living your indoor life constantly at noon.
It's why software like f.lux was created (and the functionality has been incorporated into some OSes as well).
Most people have an expectation that residential lighting is on the "warm" (low color temperature!) side. I have a lot of Hue and Sengled bulbs in the house which are tunable and my son complains that they look "harsh" when they are set to a high color temperature. Myself I do art projects that require making fine sensory distinctions and it clear to me that I can do that better with more blue light.
I've seen high-quality incandescent bulbs however that do very well on my tests despite being "warm" but I think a lot of people like using daylight from out the north window for evaluating prints and it was was a revolution a few decades back when art museums realized that higher color temperature lights brought out colors better.
I'd imagine that the "warm" color temperature is modeled after candle and gas lighting but after reading some articles on the history of light bulbs it seems that all the folks working on it were trying to make the brightest, whitest light they possibly could. Today's "daylight" bulbs would probably be perceived as an engineering wonder by those folks.
Nowadays the situation is better, but for years after incandescents were banned in California, the only LED bulbs available in stores had a huge spike in the blue part of the spectrum, which I experienced as painful and now know probably caused the death of some of the cones in my retina through oxidative stress.
(I am over 60 and have some health problems that chronically elevate my levels of oxidative stress -- in all cell types, though the light-detecting cells in the retina are more vulnerable than other types of cells are.)
I.e., I wanted to buy an LED that vaguely approximated a 2700K incandescent, tried many brands, but could not find one, so I don't know what you are on about.
Bright blue light will make a brain more alert -- and the effect is immediate. That is probably why you young people like it, but I am baffled by your "a color temperature of only 2700K is often chosen" (not that color temperature is a useful way of summarizing the spectrum of and LED bulb).
Not just incandescent filament bulbs, the original artificial light was literally incandescent - gas lamps, oil lamps, beef tallow, candles, tallow etc.
> Even though LED bulbs have no such limitations, a color temperature of only 2700K is often chosen.
I think there's a reason for this, which is that sunlight supplements indoor lighting during the day. People rely on indoor lighting more at night when those warmer tones are most desirable.
It used to be that you only had one option so you didn’t have to think about it.
But, that single option was at least "good enough". I never bought a normal incandescent bulb only to have the color rendering/brightness/etc be downright awful.
LEDs come packaged as "daylight" or "bright white" or whatever else. I want one that's labelled "just like your normal 60W incandescent".
I highly disagree about it being good enough. Those bulbs got hot and were expensive to run over the life of the bulb. I like a lot of light, so I'd often end up buying lots of 100W lightbulbs throughout my house. My kitchen would have like 6x100W lightbulbs on for several hours a day, so ~3.6kWh/day. At $0.11/kWh that's $11.88/mo just lighting my kitchen. $142.56/year to light one room one quarter of the day. And that's before thinking about how much extra heat I'm adding to my house when I'm spending tons of money running an AC to pump heat out of it. Add up all the rest of the lights in my house, its a lot of money just to have the lights on over a year.
For comparison, a similar lumen setup with LED lights in my kitchen runs ~$19/yr to operate. ~13W compared to ~100W. I spent probably less than $80 total swapping out the bulbs and have not had any early failures after a couple of years. The quality of the lights are excellent, in fact in some ways better as I'd prefer closer 5000K in a kitchen as opposed to 2500K.
I've found the color/brightness of the GE Relax HD (Yeah, they go one step further and label the color temperature as "Relax HD") to be pretty good. Lifespan has been hit and miss in semi-enclosed fixtures though.
And the single option was cheap. There are cheap LEDs, but they're going to flicker, or hum audibly, and die quickly (contrary to the advertising). It's taken many rounds of trial and error, many wasted dollars, and I still don't love the bulbs I've landed on that much.
Twenty years ago I remember a lot of PR about "full spectrum" incandescents and flourescents - no LEDs then! - there was a lot of talk at the time about Seasonal Affective Disorder.
I bought a few different options to check out, and looked at some photo prints under them. They blew the "basic" incandescents away, the photos popped and looked much more lively instead of yellow-tinted and dim.
Sure but it’ll cost $100. The efficiency of LEDs is a joke when you factor in materials, manufacturing, and subjective utility. We’re paying more for worse.
I think it was worse in the past. I had to chose a daylight, warm or soft bulb. Now I buy one bulb capable of changing color temp and brightness from my couch and it lasts way longer. This is exactly the kinda thing sci fi had when I was a kid and now its in every room of my house.
What if you don't want to become an expert, which is something that wouldn't scale for every piece of tech and equipment? (Maybe you enjoy tweaking with lights, but what about chairs, tabletop materials, woods, wall paints, and yes -- electronic gadgets?).
With LEDs, what's the "I don't want to deal with this, I just want something that will work as intended and not introduce weird artifacts"?
I totally agree- that's why I think we need better branding and marketing in stores. I personally like the Costco model of "do the research for the consumer and give them limited choices" but it's easy to see how this could go wrong too.
I'm sure early incandescent lightbulb manufacturers had a lot of shoddy products and consumers just had to figure out which brands to trust themselves. Eventually, it'll even out for LEDs too.
I generally buy the lamps that say "warm white". They're usually the 2700k variety. I've literally never had an LED light go out and the colours look fine. Philips lamps seem like a good bet, though I remember seeing an in depth YouTube review that showed that IKEA actually had better colour representation (many brands add an extra dose of red light to boost the warm colours).
Not skimping on lamps helps prevent most problems, usually. IKEA sells great LED lights over here in Europe, for prices that had me worried at first. Most other budget stores and brands sell lamps that mostly emit warm light but will make any food look disgusting from missing wavelengths; fine for lighting a hallway maybe, but generally not worth it in my opinion. It's mostly these bottom of the barrel lamps that people buy, not knowing about the effects cheap lighting can have, that cause visual problems.
It makes sense: back in the day, a cheap lamp may not have lasted as long ,but the colour profile was nearly identical. If you were fine buying a lamp every year, you could just grab the cheapest bulb on the shelf. With anything beyond incandescent light, that's not true anymore.
The difference between a €5 lamp and a €10 lamp is quite significant and worth it considering they'll probably last you at least five years anyway. My personal approach is to look for "warm white" (or 2700k if they use that instead), not pick the very cheapest lamp I can find, and if that leaves multiple options, start comparing statistics like CRI.
why are you acting like you need a college credit in an LED survey course in order to buy incandescent-replacement LEDs? It's like a new vocabulary of like 5 terms/concepts that can all be summarized in a sentence or two.
When I upgraded my house, I spent maybe 30 min reading some articles and then 30 more going through product listings [1]. To upgrade a core piece of infra for my whole house.
[1] I can already hear people saying "an HOUR???" But guess what now I know about LED bulbs forever.
Some people seem to have different memories than I do of what it was like buying lightbulbs before LEDs came out. I remember incandescents also having a variety of color quality, lifespan, and decorative options. I remember having the choice between bargain bin bulbs and luxurious options, making sure to outfit a room with a single brand so everything looked the same, realizing it's more difficult to read with this one or that, keeping receipts in the box in case they don't live up to the "double life" (2000 hours!) branding, the annoyance of having a regular bulb in a 3-way lamp, or a faulty circuit causing lights to flicker, not to mention the fire hazard of having something too close to an exposed bulb.
Things are not so different now. As it was then, we still have crappy products with too little information and too much marketing. Having CRI ratings on the box is a good change (a spectrogram would have been nice though), I think it cuts down the trial and error it takes to find something suitable. What I don't like are all the built-in specialty lighting sources. More and more we're seeing fixtures with custom LED panels instead of sockets, which often means more expensive trial-and-error when it turns out that expensive "dimmable" ceiling light is doing PWM at 60 Hz, or when it dies one year out of warranty and you have to change the entire decorative housing instead of just replacing a bulb. The good news is that it's easier than ever to ask strangers what worked for them, and it's still less expensive to find and buy high quality LED bulbs than it is to use incandescents.
I do have different memories than you about buying lightbulbs. I remember thinking 60-watt bulbs are frustratingly dim, 75 watt bulbs are a minimum, but what I really wanted every time was a 100 watt bulb, it just improves visual acuity tremendously. And my frustration with LED and flourescents, etc is that I can't find the equivalent of my good old 100 watt bulb; whatever the new rating systems are, it's all an excuse for "it's a little dimmer"
(don't get me wrong, I like dim lighting, I prefer it, I don't turn lights on when I get up in the morning, I make coffee, I take showers in the dark, people come into spaces that I'm in and always snap the lights on and it drives me crazy. I'm simply saying, when I want to turn a light on to see, I want it to cast a good amount of light.)
(oh, let me add on, I also know that 1 tiny little blue or white LED power indicator on each of a few gadgets I buy seem able to bathe my bedroom in light when I'm trying sleep.)
It's really not that hard to find 15w LEDs with CRI95+. 15w will be approximately equivalent to a 100 watt bulb. A quick Amazon search pulls up multiple options.
Recently I even got out the big guns and bought this thing, mainly to replace my halogen floor lamp. It's 40w, and more like the equivalent to a 250w incandescent, though it is awkwardly ginormous.
I ended up buying adaptors that turn a light socket into two sockets. Then you can achieve something approaching 100W, or better, with a couple of averagely dim LEDs.
>>"I like dim lighting, I prefer it, I don't turn lights on when I get up in the morning, I make coffee, I take showers in the dark, people come into spaces that I'm in and always snap the lights on and it drives me crazy."
Man, My brother is a constant light-stepper (he always has on harsh, too bright, lights even when he is not in THAT room, or if he falls asleep.
It drives me nuts!
STOP TURNING ON FLOURESCENT TUBE LIGHTS AND FALLING ASLEEP!!
I recognize the visual acuity, but I cannot stand tube-FLs at all - and while I have every single bulb in my house an addressable RGB LED Alexa bulb (Feit Electric) -- there are certain lights I cant replace (a few ceiling fans with integrated LED lights, tube lights in certain spots, etc) -- I have learned that the position of the lights is also important.
For example, if the kitchen tube light is on, it lasers-into the corner of my eye if I am sitting on the couch at night and the kitchen tube light is on. I cant alexify that just yet (the alexa light switches require a 3-phase (meaning the requirement of a ground wire) to mount -- my house was built in 1959 and the wall switches do not have the req ground wire....
but yeah - its interesting how sensitive you become to the lighting environment once you pay attention to it.
When I was doing architecture, I was always wondering why we paid "lighting designers" so much... but after working with them, and working with lighting in my own home, I am amazed at what they accomplish with lights.
i had a similar view, until i found COB LED stripes (with dimmers), with 20W per m (LED W, not equivalent, i have mounted a few of those 3-10m (!), and now can have dimmed 1% background lights and hospital style brightness as well.
I've had good luck finding 100w equivalents at my local big box store. Only in the bright white color format though which looks terrible indoors. So those get used on outdoor fixtures and in my utility room and garage.
Fortunately, my home has plenty of overhead lighting and a few lamps, so 60w soft white bulbs are sufficient for the other rooms in the house.
I had been unaware of measurement according to "moles of photons", though I suppose it's not surprising. I've never really understood what a mole is other than "we decided to pick this number as a constant multiplier when doing small calculations".
Per wikipedia[0], there's a vaguely defined unit, the Einstein, which may be defined as the energy in a mole of photons. (The vague definition being because each photon may have different amounts of energy, and thus an Einstein would be some weird function in order to describe total energy.) Wikipedia suggests using measures of Photosynthetically Active Radiation (PAR)[1], like Photosynthetic photon flux (PPF) instead. I suppose this is because PAR is literally defined to measure according to "what plants crave", but it also allows bounding the "total joules of energy" above and below by the PAR wavelength limits.
I'd been dealing with flickering CFL bulbs for some time already. My fovea is about 10hz slower than the rest of my retina. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 58hz versus 68hz (70Hz CRT displays were a goddamned revelation for me, when I could finally afford them. Thank you Iiyama.)
Things flickering in the corner of your vision is distracting af.
But then my partner started complaining about headaches reading, but only in certain rooms in the house. I put two and two together and stopped buying a brand of CFL (I might have upgraded to LEDs at this point, I don't recall).
More recent advice was to go to the hardware store and record a slow motion video of the demo bulbs, to see if you can detect flicker during playback, but I think I've only succeeded in that one time and so I'm not sure if it doesn't work as well as advertised or if retailers have gotten better vendors.
Philips has "SceneSwitch" bulbs which are NOT 3-way lamps, but sort of approximate the 3-way behavior: When you toggle the power off and back on again within <1s, they'll cycle between bright, medium, and dim. (With color temperature becoming lower as you dim.)
I've made these my standard lightbulb for any non-dimmable lamp/fixture, so pretty much every light in my house can be dimmed now.
(Any fixture attached to a dimmer gets Philips "Warm Glow" bulbs, which also get warmer as you dim them, and which do a good job of filtering out flicker.)
>If you’re lucky, the LED will have a CRI of 90 or higher
EU has banned incandescent lights years ago and the situation for LED buyers is much different here. My local drug store chain (Rossmann in Germany) sells 1000lm E27 bulbs under their own Rubin brand with CRI>97 for 4.99€. No flickering and available as 2700K or 4000K. My Opple Light Master 3 even reads CRI 100. So for me right now, it's just going to the drug store and buying a bulb, like before the ban.
I read a lot of the other comments here before yours and they all seemed to describe a reality very different from my own experience. Then I saw yours and it suddenly makes sense. I am also in the Europe, most other commenters seem to be from the US.
Here I find it is very easy to find good LED bulbs with the strength and color profile of my choice and I have used LED in all rooms of my house for the last 10+ years without any failing so far.
> I am also in the Europe, most other commenters seem to be from the US.
You're falling for the "Europe is better than the US, of course" mindset. What you are actually seeing are partisans spinning a narrative to fit their ideology, not an accurate description of reality.
We have really high CRI bulbs here, too, and they're inexpensive. I can go down to the home store and buy them by the dozen. I'll bet you money that bulbs in the US and bulbs in Europe are mostly manufactured in the same place...
I'm in the US and every single LED bulb I've ever bought - some ten years old - still work fine.
I also don't buy the shitty cheap bulbs. I buy mostly Cree's high CRI dimmable bulbs, Phillips high CRI dimmable, or GE high-CRI bulbs if I can't find the Crees (Home Depot stopped carrying them in-store.)
The problem is that both the author and a ton of people in this discussion buy shitty, cheap, no-name bulbs and then they're shocked when they flicker, don't dim well, and fail often.
This whole discussion is a bunch of angry old men yelling at clouds because the guvmint won't allow them to waste 4x as much electricity to light their home.
Even high-CRI bulbs aren't a "perfect" replacement for an incandescent, but the energy savings, especially if you're in an area where you use air conditioning and thus the heat of an incandescent bulb equals more energy usage for cooling, is worth the small sacrifice.
I'm not sure if this is the norm in Europe, the only chain store I know that sells high CRI (>90) bulbs is IKEA. If I go to my local home store or supermarket, they are all junk Chinese bulbs that I doubt are really even 80 CRI.
CRI isn't even something you can filter by on their online catalogues. At least the new EU energy labeling let's you see what the specs are.
As much as I like EU, the new bulbs are flickery shit.
I bought a stockpile of 150W incandescent bulbs marked as 'shock resistant' (they are definitely not) and they give decent light.
The 100W LEDs give more like 50W and flicker too..
I hate how many of these things aren't limits of the technology but rather the result of cost optimization and general apathy towards the customer. We know how to mass-produce quality LEDs to the point entire TVs are made of the things. We know how to mass-produce rectifiers pretty much ever since diodes existed. We know how to cool mass-produced objects in compact spaces. But because we apparently can't have nice things, we don't get the product of all that knowledge; instead we get whatever cost optimized bullshit gets shat out of a factory run by MBAs.
This same reasoning is why I'm not bullish on AI; what the potential is and what we peasants get to use are vastly different
The issue isn’t that MBAs have cost reduced bulbs for no reason. The issue is that 95% of consumers will only choose the cheap bulbs, period. As a result, that’s what gets produced at scale.
> We know how to mass-produce quality LEDs to the point entire TVs are made of the things.
They’re not the same thing. Displays are optimized for specific R, G, and B color points. White LEDs are optimized for full, smooth spectrums.
The big problem for me is, as a consumer, how do I know that brand X is producing quality bulbs that'll last a long time? I'm very happy to pay more for that. How does one sift through marketing to get to actual quality?
And then how do I know that they stick with the high quality approach? What happens when a brand decides to rest on the laurels of their brand name and start slipping in lower quality parts?
I really wish i could find a brand that would reliably tick all the boxes:
- Does not overdrive the LEDs and Does not run power supply components at the limit of what they can. (Thus good longevity)
- Has a current based driver, so that slight voltage shifts from an appliance kicking on don't result in an obvious brightness shift.
- Suitable for use in recessed lighting or enclosed fixtures. (For better or worse, can lights and enclosed fixtures are still relatively common.)
- Makes bulbs in most common shapes like A19, chandelier, and PAR/BR shapes (for recessed lighting fixtures)
- Dimmable (And yes, I am quite well aware that being in conjunction with a current source driver is more complicated, but it is still possible). I'm not even particularly big on dimming, but I am big on smart switches, and many of those include dimming capabilities, and I don't want to worry about which bulbs I put where.
- Good color rendering index (and other similar features)
Even the linked companies products don't meet the full list. Their only dimmable A-series bulbs are the filament bulbs, which are not suitable for all use cases. Similarly, non of the non-filament bulbs in the A series shapes are marked as suitable for use in an enclosure.
That's not entirely true. I guarantee that someone at Philips is tuning their drivers not just on manufacturing cost, but also to "optimize" lifetime. That you can pay a premium for less "optimized" drivers is as much about market segmentation as it is about BOM costs.
As evidence, notice that Philips refuses to sell the Dubai lamp outside Dubai. They are designed for truly long lifetimes, and nobody at Philips want's that.
As consumers are we really supposed to do a ton of research on light bulbs and accept that we can't run down to Home Depot and get some new bulbs when they go out in our house?
Waveform Lighting bulbs have a great CRI and no camera visible flicker, but even they are overdriven/undercooled. I've already had one fail because of the PFC chip (I did an autopsy). They also don't have enough bulk capacitance to not flicker when other nasty loads are on the line.
I did find these tables from Budget Light Forums handy for shopping, however the fact that you have to use these I think only reinforces the point of the article:
As a side point, the bulbs from the link you shared might be of good quality but very, very low power by my standards. In order to work comfortably I need "200W replacements", not 40W-60W. This has enormous influence on my mood in winter months, probably people in warmer climates care less.
The "VIVID" line by SORAA are also high-quality high-CRI LEDs with good cooling solutions, and they're available in things like MR16 GU10 for desk lamps with the "weird" bulbs with two little prongs. I got a cheap GU10 desk clamp lamp on Amazon and spent twice as much as the lamp itself (which came with a functional bulb) on the nicer bulb. The exact model was SM16GA-09-60D-930-03 if anyone is curious -- fabulous super-bright desk lamp that is very flood-y and covers a large area with a very small lamp head.
But yeah, explaining to normal folks that they need $30-$60 lightbulbs for every fixture in their home is basically a non-starter, but for me, I use this lamp every day and it should last a decade or more, so the value prop isn't bad, especially compared to spending $500 or so on something like a Humanscale "nice" desk lamp, which technically has much worse CRI and much lower output.
We recently built our home and went with WAC recessed lighting in all the main areas, which was about a $15k premium over just using what the contractor wanted to use, involved a lighting design company (that was also purchased the fixtures from), and took a dozen+ hours of our time and input, but I think it was worth it in the grand scheme of how much we spent. I personally can't stand hanging out at peoples houses where they have mismatched lights or just very poor lighting; it kills any interior design niceties and makes you really realize how much lighting affects the general feeling of indoor spaces.
I use https://www.1000bulbs.com/ because they have godzillion bulbs in stock and it's possible to filter by CRI and color temperature. I just get highest CRI in required color temp, and it's good. More expensive, but well worth it.
I believe I tried to buy from them when I lived in SF, but their bulbs were at that time (and possibly still today) illegal in the state of California! I don't remember which regulation it was, possibly one around efficiency or maybe they needed to undergo some test. I think they even had a lab somewhere on the peninsula, too... I was so angry at the state of California for forcing me to have shit quality lights that I gave thought to becoming an illegal bulb runner.
> The issue is that 95% of consumers will only choose the cheap bulbs, period.
Because the big box stores (Walmart, Home Depot or whatever) don't carry expensive stuff with Cree LEDs and solid cooling designs. They carry whatever shit they can get their hands on for as cheap as possible.
And most consumers don't know better, the 1% of consumers that does know orders from Amazon and prays for not getting ripped off by counterfeiters.
You can, but as GP comment said, "Good indoor lighting is now something only people with plenty of disposable income can afford." When you're poor, are you going to cough up $18 for a single bulb, or get a 16-pack for $24 at Home Depot? $288 vs $24.
99% of white LEDs on the market arhave anything but full, smooth spectrums. Most of my lighting is from waveform lighting but you have to pay the premium for full spectrum, plus you have to shell out for expensive dimmers if you don't want flickering.
Thanks for the tip! Just ordered a light bulb from them to check them out against the standard crap I have around my house. Curious to see the results.
just because somebody decides to geek out about LED bulbs, does't mean all those stats that are theoretically measurable actually make a difference.
the 4-for-$10 A19 LED bulbs from amazon or ikea are flicker free to my eyes. i've bought some fancy bulbs with big metal heatsink bases, supposed "high CRI" ratings, equivalently high price tags. to my eyes, i can't see the difference. the super-cheap bulbs from one of those amazon marketplace sellers with a randomly generated name are flickery, but just going up to anything other than the absolute bare minimum of quality is good enough. "what the peasants get to use" is because that's actually probably good enough for what us peasants need. if you want to geek out about super high-end LEDs, you're not going to find that in consumer-grade products and that's probably fine.
Very rarely will bulbs visibly flicker in my experience. What happens instead is after several hours I'll start to get headaches and feel fatigue without knowing exactly where it's coming from. Since I replaced my Hue bulbs (which flicker, and I proved it by just using my smartphone camera even) I've felt so much better at home
rather the result of cost optimization and general apathy towards the customer
Apathy towards the consumer, or by the consumer? I don’t think I’m alone when I say that I just buy name brand LED bulbs (usually Phillips) in the color temperature of my choice and am completely satisfied with them. Color rendition is fine, no noticeable flicker, long lifetime. In the past 7 years I haven’t had any fail prematurely, though I’ve replaced some early to change color temperature.
To get a market for lemons, the following characteristics are required:
- Nonuniform products or services with widely-varying quality.
- Expensive quality assessment.
- Poor information on relative quality, whether by distortions by sellers or lack of sophistication of buyers, or both.
You find this all over the place, with one notable example being tech recruiting (which appears multiple times in the HN/Algolia search above).
This is also a characteristic which leads to worsening product quality as formerly niche markets expand. Bicycles, audio equipment, and electronics are classic instances of these. A larger market is inherently less sophisticated, and more easily distracted by spurious or irrelevant characteristics of products.
Another tendency is for cargo-culting and fads to develop. That is, as products or services become more complex, a follow-the-herd mentality appears, where (apparently successful) influencers drive follow-on behaviour. Often, of course, the influencers and early-adopters themselves have a poor understanding or capability of distinguishing between high- and low-quality offerings. Given random selection, some will emerge as either successful or lucky over others.
There are some mitigations. In the case of used-car markets, for example, the emergence of vehicle history services (e.g., CarFax), reduces informational asymmetries. In the case of appliances, certification services (e.g., Underwriters Laboratories) and review organisations (e.g., Consumer Reports) aided greatly, as did uniform trade practices such as implied warrantee of fitness and generous return policies (both of which reduce buyers' risk).
As for your assessment of AI's future market, that seems highly probable to me, and would greatly dampen actual positive prospects within the field.
> This seems like an excellent business opportunity.
Consumer education is rarely an excellent business opportunity.
Consumers are very good at comparing prices, and "incandescent watt equivalent" labels provide an understandable comparator for light output. Beyond that, the statistics become much less meaningful.
Consumers typically don't read colour temperature ratings (in black-body Kelvin), but instead follow "warm white / soft white / cool white" descriptors. Even still, it's common to see homes with temperature-mismatched lighting.
CRI is a step worse. It is a higher-is-better indicator, but there's no intuitive connection for a consumer. Is a CRI of 80 bad? Is 95 better enough to be worth double the price? Worse yet, CRI is a summary statistic that can gloss over less-measured color reproduction difficulties, and worst yet not all bulbs even publish CRI numbers on the box. My local hardware store is happy to sell you its store-brand generics, none of which have CRI numbers.
Flicker is another step into the unknown. No bulbs that I'm aware of publish flicker numbers, even the otherwise respected names like Philips. If you consider this a 'business opportunity', you're left with an unverifiable claim that your bulbs are uniquely better than the competition.
Sadly, for now good LED lighting really is the domain of the expensive professional or the hobbyist who spends their spare time tracking down reviews or building custom lighting rigs.
I can sell a million devices that cost me $4 apiece, or I can sell 1.5 million devices that cost me $3 apiece. That only stops if I have a competitor selling $4.60 bulbs that take away all of my customers.
As long as we're all shoveling shit, nobody gets a whiff of fresh air.
This is a trend that has spread into every aspect of specifically American society.
Items have been replaced with poorer quality versions, and the originals become incredibly expensive or impossible to find. Once the downsides of the new version become clear, you are left with obvious and uncounted inflation. It's a mixture of shrink-flation and planned obsolescence.
Examples such as: 100% juice, window blinds, light-bulbs, furniture, vegetables (tomatoes, corn, etc), produce (specifically meat), buildings/building materials.
Until one day you notice you are living in a fake house and eating fake food. And some guy who works for the fed says you have it better than ever because you have a microwave.
> the result of cost optimization and general apathy towards the customer
aka capitalism? People prioritize price over quality, but you can't make something better the cheaper it gets. So in an open and "fair" competitive market, all goods and services get shittier over time. It's a race to the bottom.
"cost optimization and general apathy towards the customer." that's just this stage of capitalism unfortunately. Take an airplane trip and you will experience similar effects.
It’s not MBAs place to set public policy though is it? If it’s the MBA’s fault at all it’s because they’re doing their job which is optimising the product to the market. If the markets not optimising the right things then that’s a failure in the market. Maybe the market is being manipulated somehow has it was for the old incandescent bulbs - but that’s not necessarily the fault of the management tier … some economise regulate for consumer value … some for profit
Cost optimization IS the limits of the technology. All the nice things you mention are the result of large amounts of work by exceptional people. This costs money. Most of them require higher-spec components, or more design time, or more complicated fabrication and assembly. These things also cost money.
Nobody's denying you nice things at low prices just out of spite. Nice things just cost more. To put a positive spin on it, our innate sense of 'nice' is a well tuned heuristic for good engineering (and/or whatever the Joneses can't afford).
I had an epiphany this year that I don't need to conform to the lightbulb socket interface any longer, now that things like straight-wired LED modules [1] are available. They waste a lot less space on unnecessary hardware, and can therefore fill more space with useful light producing material. I've been slowly converting my big round ceiling fixtures and the light and dimming performance is nothing short of miraculous.
So now changing the "lightbulb" becomes an infinitely harder task, and in some areas requires you to pull a permit and or hire an electrician (e.g. do you think a retiree is going to change this themselves?). This seems nice predicated that LEDs last 10-years or longer, which per the article and elsewhere isn't the case.
This movement away from standard bulb-sockets to direct wiring is short-term-ism at its finest. Least of all because very time you rewire this, you're going to degrade or shorten the wires.
I remember watching a documentary long ago about the history of computing. In it, someone expressed skepticism of transistor-based integrated circuits because unlike vacuum tubes, the transistors in an IC couldn't be replaced when they failed.
I've replaced a couple ceiling sockets with panel-type LED fixtures and they're going strong years later. Perhaps they'll fail eventually, but their lifespan has far exceeded anything I've screwed into a socket, so the increased replacement effort/cost has already paid for itself.
The direct wiring is of course not as easy as changing a lightbulb. However I find the trade worth the improved light quality and we can agree to disagree about the short-termism of it.
Is it just me or is there something off about this article? It reads quite incoherent.
I happen to work with a lot of LED light sources nowadays and I can see most problems discussed are related to the light fixture, driver or psychology.
More often than not it is the capacitors in these mains powered LEDs that fail first, because the circuit is designed to run at the highest temperature possible to lower the cost of the final product.
The bulbs, or LED chips, looks quite innocent in this regard.
Well, I'd guess for most people it doesn't matter whether the LED-chips themselves, capacitors, or some other part of the circuitry fails. If cost-cut cheap LED bulbs with components driven to the max are the norm, consumers will obviously associate LED bulbs with the kind of problems that causes and not with what LED tech could be if it'd be given more budget to breathe.
This article and comment section is bizarre to me. It's like travelling back in time to the 2000s.
We've only used LEDs in my country for, what, 15 years now? They are perfectly fine, no issues really, much cheaper than incandescent bulbs of course. We just buy the ones in IKEA and they haven't really failed us so far.
I guess you can't tell the difference? For me it's huge. I recently changed my bathroom downlights from dimmable LEDs to dimmable halogens, and it's so much nicer. The colour temperature was the same, so I guess it's not that. It's something else about the way they work. I don't profess to know why, but I can absolutely tell the difference, and I have a very clear preference now. And this is after a decade of me being very bullish on LEDs for environmental reasons and proudly fitting LEDs everywhere possible (expensive, carefully chosen ones too, with appropriate colour temperature). At the end of the day, LED light is just horrible for some reason.
I think it's the flicker. Pulse width modulation is evil. I'm not aware of a single instance where it's preferable over an analogue adjustment. It's a horrible and thoroughly "non-human" solution to a problem. The most annoying thing for me is that car headlights are now PWM LEDs. I can see the flicker, especially in my peripheral vision. It's highly distracting and annoying.
There are three factors: tint, flicker, and color rendering.
You're familiar with color temperature - that's essentially the orange-blue axis for white light, but there's also a red/green tint axis to consider. Humans vision is most sensitive to green light, and the lumen as a unit is calibrated to human visual sensitivity. You'll never guess what companies trying to add a few more lm/W to their efficiency rating do to the tint. Incidentally, one study I read that doesn't seem to be online anymore found people prefer tints redder than incandescent bulbs.
Flicker can come from running LEDs from AC, resulting in a low-frequency flicker that's very visible to more sensitive people. Incandescent bulbs change brightness much slower, so they're fine on AC. Another possibility is a power supply in the LED bulb that intentionally flickers the LEDs, usually at a higher frequency than mains power in order to control brightness with pulse-width modulation. Flicker-free variable constant current power supplies are available, but tend to be more expensive than PWM.
Finally, color rendering is affected by the spectrum of the light. An incandescent bulb has a spectrum that peaks at a specific wavelength and falls off relatively smoothly to the sides. LEDs can have a wide variety of spectra, often with many peaks and valleys, such that the two light sources viewed directly can look the same, but render colors very differently. A crude measurement of this is color rendering index, and many LEDs advertise theirs. 100 is the highest possible rating, and over 95 is considered very good.
The problem with CRI is it's based on a mere eight color samples, and leaves out some colors LEDs tend to be bad at. It's getting more common to see an R9 (deep red rendering) rating advertised. LEDs often do badly on R9, and there can be a big penalty to efficiency to achieve a high rating. Less commonly advertised, but also a common weakness for LEDs is R12 (deep blue rendering).
I care about this stuff and use an LED videography panel with adjustable color temperature to light my work environment. It's neutral to slightly reddish, flicker-free, has excellent CRI (97) and R9 (98). R12 is a bit weak (82).
I also have the ikea home smart bubls. They're dimmable and can change color.
It seems like some people are more sensetive to flickering light. I've asked people every now and then when in a group if they can tell the light is flickering, and I'm usually the only one. The effect is pronounced in my peripheral vision and somehow even more when drunk.
I don't think these lights emit the entire spectrum of light either, but a spectrum that "fools" us to think we're seeing the whole spectrum. Maybe that feels uncomfortable for some?
The ikea bulbs I have flicker a little when dimmed, but I don't really mind.
I had literally the exact opposite experience when swapping mine out. Both the incandescent and halogen replacements resulted in a _way_ better quality of lighting. And these were just like "first ones off the shelf" from the Home Depot or something- I'm not exactly sure it was maybe 10 years ago. But I vividly remember thinking how much better the lighting quality was, and I had far more options in terms of color temp, which was great.
You're right that the colour temperature isn't the whole story - it's a single number trying to represent a spectrum which is a line graph. So you can have wildly different spectra with the same CRI.
But even so, good LEDs are perfectly fine. Don't assume that all LEDs are crap because you bought one cheap set and they weren't very good.
Seriously. I always thought I was very picky, both to flickering and color temp(3000k FTW). Sure, the >3000K bulbs look like death, and I've had issues with some bulbs flickering, but overall I'm really happy with the light output of my LEDs(color temp, CRI, stability, longevity). I'm in the US too. Not sure what folks are complaining about.
That's because it is. George W. Bush signed the death warrant for the incandescent bulb in the US in 2007. Incandescent bulbs are a niche product in the US, LEDs have been the mainstream choice for years.
Readit News
- LED emitters driven hard for cost reasons, age and fail quickly
- Power supplies driven hard for cost reasons, age and fail quickly
- Poor CRI and SSRI
- Flickering
- Dim-to-warm is uncommon
- Poorly designed power supplies that age and fail quickly
- The same light quality is vastly more expensive to achieve with LEDs, even if you account for high electricity prices. Good indoor lighting is now something only people with plenty of disposable income can afford.
- It is quite difficult to even buy high quality LEDs as a mere mortal
- Retrofits generally work poorly on principle
- LEDs mix exceptionally poorly, making things even more expensive
In a screw base, maybe. But compare:
https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/luminus-devices-i...
$25 for an excellent 700mA driver, 86% efficient.
https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/bridgelux/BXRH-30...
$3.45 for a very nice, ~2000lm 97 CRI LED, about 99 lm/W. (Efficiency goes up quite a bit if you settle for 90 CRI.)
So that gives about 2000lm at about 25W, for <$30.
Wikipedia gives about 16 lm/W for incandescent, so 125W. At 10 hour per day, the LED options pays for itself quickly even at national average prices. In CA, it’s very fast.
To be fair, for high-end LEDs like this, the balance of the system is more expensive, because you need a heat sink. Incandescent lamps run very hot and don’t need heat sinks.
I think this is potentially promising, but I don’t think you can buy it:
https://tlo.mit.edu/technologies/high-efficiency-incandescen...
Sadly, with San Fran anywhere from 4.5x, or more than where I live (Quebec), and with LED products lastly barely longer than incandescent bulbs, it is typically a loss.
Maybe a 5 year warranty on LED bulbs should be a law, to ensure better quality control and build. The competitors can compete around that requirement.
10 hours per day sounds like a crazy amount of time to use a light. I think we use some lights in our house maybe 4 hours per day on average max. Maybe I just have a lot of windows and don't live in Alaska in the winter.
I ordered samples of a lot of LEDs and found that almost all of them are using their parts, especially capacitors, well above the specs.
Driving caps at well above their specs, at high temperature, basically ensures speedy failure. Not only that, but undersized smoothing capacitor causes visible 100Hz flicker.
What's even more interesting is at the price point putting better caps was almost inconsequential to the price of the product. I have ordered capacitors that should have been there in the first place and replaced the original ones with the new ones. Not only LEDs are flicker free now, I suspect they will be serving me for much longer.
Well, the LEDs themselves will last up to 20 years, so they have to make something in the bulb fail before that. Can't have people only buying replacement bulbs every other decade.
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If all that's true, it explains my experience that LEDs have totally failed to live up to their promise. Sure, they use less power than incandescents, but they're far more expensive and also more finicky. They were supposed to last a decade, but I'm lucky if I get a year or two out of them. I wonder what the environmental impact is when you factor in e-waste and manufacturing costs.
About the only clear win for me is they run much cooler, which is nice when you have underpowered AC (or no AC).
> - LEDs mix exceptionally poorly, making things even more expensive
I'm not sure exactly what you mean here, but (compared to incandescents), different models of LED differ significantly in light characteristics and start up time. More than once I've had to replace all the bulbs in a fixture, because I couldn't buy and equivalent replacement for one that failed.
[0] https://www.ikea.com/ca/en/p/solhetta-led-bulb-e26-450-lumen...
They overheat and die really fast if used in something that's not vented/cooled. You need fixtures that fully expose the bulb so it doesn't burn itself out.
Amusing that LED bulbs, the energy savers, die from excess heat.
So having a minimum CRI of 80-90 is a good starting point, there are issues with the CRI measure itself:
> Ra is the average value of R1–R8; other values from R9 to R15 are not used in the calculation of Ra, including R9 "saturated red", R13 "skin color (light)", and R15 "skin color (medium)", which are all difficult colors to faithfully reproduce. R9 is a vital index in high-CRI lighting, as many applications require red lights, such as film and video lighting, medical lighting, art lighting, etc. However, in the general CRI (Ra) calculation R9 is not included.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_rendering_index#Special_...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_rendering_index#Criticis...
There are initiatives to come up with a better metric, but there doesn't seem to be much traction:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_quality_scale
The same utility pays for those efficiency projects.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klaJqofCsu4
Ketra was good, smart bulbs like Hue with an open API, but far better than Hue. Lutron bought them, killed the API and and proceeded to require inferior and costly priority controls
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Dead Comment
I made sure they were all the same color temperature, and also all >> 90 CRI.
The main issue I've seen is that dimmer switches are usually not compatible with the electronics in high-end fixtures, and that high-end fixtures often take a long time to power on. (Like, walk across the room and open the fridge amounts of time.)
They should choose a standard way of dimming bulbs that doesn't result in noticeable 60hz flicker, and that dictates a max 100ms turn on latency, then ban the sale of "dimmer compatible" LED bulbs, or "LED compatible" dimmer switches that are not compliant with that standard.
Also, bulb reliability should be tracked, and any product with a > 5% failure rate in the first 5 years should either be banned, or the company should have to put replacement funds into escrow.
(Current bulbs have a ~ 5-10% failure rate from what I've seen.)
Yeah, I love Alec's Technology Connections video on some bulbs with that feature, but he pointed it partly because some of the few bulbs that offered it seemed to be getting phased out.
Its much like a bunch of other points on the list. There are a fair few that would only add a small amount of additional cost, but because the companies can save money by not doing it, they don't.
It does not actually cost all that much more to add a few more diodes, to avoid severely overdriving the ones on the board, or to improve the power supply circuitry so that it will likely last longer.
But it really sucks that even if you chose to buy the more premium tier bulbs being offered at the big box store, they often don't fix some of these issues. They may have a better CRI, but are still often overdriven, with questionable power supply designs.
A cheap advice if you have to buy a retrofit LED bulb, buy the heaviest one, i.e. get a scale with (at least) gram precision and weight them. More mass - better heat dissipation, better passives.
An expensive bulb with a nice heat sink will fail just as quickly as a cheap one when you put it in a well-sealed can light or something else that traps all the hot air.
For all the benefits of LED lights, incandescent bulbs are infinitely simpler.
Although, as was pointed out to me at some point, because LEDs are more efficient, people feel less guilty about having more of them; replacing 1x40 watt bulb with 8x5 watt LEDs means the net result is the same. I've got like 7 cute LED spotlights in my TV closet for example, I wouldn't have had that setup if I was forced to use incandescent lamps.
Maybe I am missing something from this conversation, but all of my LED bulbs produce far _less_ heat than incandescent bulbs. The lamp in my bedroom no longer keeps me warm!
LEDs are definitely simpler than incandescent from a user perspective.
Man I'd love me some indoor lightning, no matter the cost.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNisqZOAaAs
- I don't see flicker on any of my cameras. The light is actually really nice for filming too.
- The price is way less than hue (I own a few, and don't think they are any better)
- I get way more light per watt than with any other bulp type. Not sure what you mean with luxury.
- I love that each of them has an independent API on their own IP. Works perfectly for my smart home design.
I've had several cheap (in build quality, not price) bulps fail on me meanwhile. Not a single WiZ had failed so far. As said I own some hue too, but I wasn't willing to spend over $1000 just on bulps for my house but then I found the WiZ brand.
Not sure if am just lucky. But I really enjoy multicolour plus warm and cold LEDs in the whole house.
I wanted to upgrade the super faint positional lights in my two garage openers, and I need to stay <= 10W, so I tried some LEDs. But they kill the 433 MHz remote signal, sadly. Tried 3 different brands, a couple of which don't actually fully turn off, or give off a loud hum to boot.
The openers use rear car light bulbs, for some reason (BA15s).
I'm going through this again now. At one point I found Philips EyeComfort bulbs on Amazon which checked all my boxes (2700-3000K, 60W, dimmable, almost non-existent flicker). I've had a couple bulbs die on me now, and I cannot for the life of me find replacements, it's like they stopped manufacturing them. I have no clue what to replace them with now
Where? How? I can no longer buy quality LED lighting at any price. I have a bunch of Sylvania Ultra Sunset Effects bulbs purchased ~15 years or so ago that nothing since even comes close to.
> Power supplies driven hard for cost reasons
Can you elaborate? What does "hard" mean here, I don't understand.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27093793
Like if you were to drive your car in 2nd gear on the freeway, at 6000rpm. The engine would wear out much quicker than if you drove in 5th gear, at 1500rpm.
So the economics just drive cost down no matter what. And even a picky consumer is hard pressed to get what he wants when you go to the bulb aisle at Lowe’s. They literally went from 10 SKUs to 250, with no meaningful standards.
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For example https://www.soraa.com/products/50-Soraa-VIVID-A19-(120v).php...
"Set all the lights to red" and every single bulb in my house and porch and walkway and garage etc, all turn red.
"Turn on/off all the light"
Set kitchen to firebrick...
Etc.
I LOVE IT.
During the day I rarely have any lights on at all - but at night I have precise control over every bulb in my house with alexa voice.
I initially would never have put alexa in my home, but now that I have it and all bulbs on it, as well as several alexa-fied power outlets, its just a very nice thing to have.
Im not too concerned over "lighting quality" - as I get exactly what I want.
The bulbs I bought were from Costco, where they had them on sale for $5 for a (2) pack. so I replaced all CFLs with RGB Wifi LEDs with alexa, and it was ~$70 to do the whole house (27) bulbs.
EDIT: Dimmability "Alexa Set Kitchen to 10%" --> I can dim or brighten all the lights at once "Alexa set house to 100%" etc...
They last for YEARS, and give a soft warm light - the bulbs I have a dim (but then 'Edison style squirrel cage bulbs have always been dim).
Let's put a capacitor before the regulator to store that power, and design the regulator to compensate for how the voltage will vary over each cycle. Since we don't want to drain our capacitor entirely, let's spec it for .05 joules at 100v, which means 10µF.
Digikey says a 10µF 200v capacitor costs ten cents.
If there's flicker, I blame the voltage regulator or lack thereof, not the requirement of power efficiency.
That there is a huge turn off for me, even if I don't have a smartphone handy ;)
Basically the industry figured out how to win at the CRI game without actually creating the same underlying spectral distribution of light. So they same up with another metric to try to optimize called SSI (also TLCI, etc.) SSI is mostly relevant in the digital cinema space, where the observer is a digital camera, not a human eye, as they can't be tricked the same way because they have different underlying RGB spectral sensitivities.
https://www.oscars.org/science-technology/projects/spectral-...
An incandescent lightbulb is a piece of tungsten wire.
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Anyone who works in stage lighting or art knows that light is complicated. We should not fault the technology for now giving us too many options, but instead improve the branding and advertising.
I actually am opposed to bans on traditional incandescent bulbs but vastly prefer LEDs and have no desire to go back to them.
Using LEDs was a shock to me initially mostly because, as you point out, with traditional household incandescents there wasn't a whole lot of options. So suddenly when I had to pay attention to color profiles and so forth more carefully, I wasn't expecting it.
But I don't see that as a bad thing, I really love all the options, and the better precision in labeling color versus power versus brightness.
One problem I've noted, that others in the thread are pointing to, is that a lot of shoddy manufacturing has taken advantage of many of the claims of LED technology to push unacceptable products. One of my pet peeves is how I've suddenly seen fixtures with integrated bulbs take over lighting departments, poorly constructed and forcing you to remove the entire fixture rather than just the bulb, when it dies after a year, much earlier than promised. But I guess even there it's just moved me to more selective lighting stores where I can still buy better fixtures separately from the bulbs.
I do think there's something to be said about declines or fraud in lightbulb manufacturing quality compared to what is possible, but I see that as a scourge of our age and not something unique to LEDs. I have as much trouble finding a quality lightbulb as I do a quality pair of pants.
AFAIK, there are no simple bans on them [ EDIT: in the USA ]. What exists are energy performance standards, which these bulbs do not meet. If you want, you can say that this is nit-picking, and that of course that's a ban.
But when we have energy performance standards for, say, cars, nobody says it is a ban on cars, just a effective end to the production of inefficient ones.
If all your indoor lighting was 5000K, then it would be like you would be living your indoor life constantly at noon.
It's why software like f.lux was created (and the functionality has been incorporated into some OSes as well).
I've seen high-quality incandescent bulbs however that do very well on my tests despite being "warm" but I think a lot of people like using daylight from out the north window for evaluating prints and it was was a revolution a few decades back when art museums realized that higher color temperature lights brought out colors better.
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Candle-shows-different-c...
I'd imagine that the "warm" color temperature is modeled after candle and gas lighting but after reading some articles on the history of light bulbs it seems that all the folks working on it were trying to make the brightest, whitest light they possibly could. Today's "daylight" bulbs would probably be perceived as an engineering wonder by those folks.
(I am over 60 and have some health problems that chronically elevate my levels of oxidative stress -- in all cell types, though the light-detecting cells in the retina are more vulnerable than other types of cells are.)
I.e., I wanted to buy an LED that vaguely approximated a 2700K incandescent, tried many brands, but could not find one, so I don't know what you are on about.
Bright blue light will make a brain more alert -- and the effect is immediate. That is probably why you young people like it, but I am baffled by your "a color temperature of only 2700K is often chosen" (not that color temperature is a useful way of summarizing the spectrum of and LED bulb).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rushlight
I think there's a reason for this, which is that sunlight supplements indoor lighting during the day. People rely on indoor lighting more at night when those warmer tones are most desirable.
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For daylight, people typically prefer daylight (5000K) bulbs.
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But, that single option was at least "good enough". I never bought a normal incandescent bulb only to have the color rendering/brightness/etc be downright awful.
LEDs come packaged as "daylight" or "bright white" or whatever else. I want one that's labelled "just like your normal 60W incandescent".
For comparison, a similar lumen setup with LED lights in my kitchen runs ~$19/yr to operate. ~13W compared to ~100W. I spent probably less than $80 total swapping out the bulbs and have not had any early failures after a couple of years. The quality of the lights are excellent, in fact in some ways better as I'd prefer closer 5000K in a kitchen as opposed to 2500K.
It wasn't if you wanted a good amount of light without having kW heater over your head.
Was it? Or was it what we were all used to, good or not, so we accepted it as good/correct.
Twenty years ago I remember a lot of PR about "full spectrum" incandescents and flourescents - no LEDs then! - there was a lot of talk at the time about Seasonal Affective Disorder.
I bought a few different options to check out, and looked at some photo prints under them. They blew the "basic" incandescents away, the photos popped and looked much more lively instead of yellow-tinted and dim.
With LEDs, what's the "I don't want to deal with this, I just want something that will work as intended and not introduce weird artifacts"?
I'm sure early incandescent lightbulb manufacturers had a lot of shoddy products and consumers just had to figure out which brands to trust themselves. Eventually, it'll even out for LEDs too.
That sounds like an ideal situation the free market should be fixing -- so why isn't it?
Not skimping on lamps helps prevent most problems, usually. IKEA sells great LED lights over here in Europe, for prices that had me worried at first. Most other budget stores and brands sell lamps that mostly emit warm light but will make any food look disgusting from missing wavelengths; fine for lighting a hallway maybe, but generally not worth it in my opinion. It's mostly these bottom of the barrel lamps that people buy, not knowing about the effects cheap lighting can have, that cause visual problems.
It makes sense: back in the day, a cheap lamp may not have lasted as long ,but the colour profile was nearly identical. If you were fine buying a lamp every year, you could just grab the cheapest bulb on the shelf. With anything beyond incandescent light, that's not true anymore.
The difference between a €5 lamp and a €10 lamp is quite significant and worth it considering they'll probably last you at least five years anyway. My personal approach is to look for "warm white" (or 2700k if they use that instead), not pick the very cheapest lamp I can find, and if that leaves multiple options, start comparing statistics like CRI.
When I upgraded my house, I spent maybe 30 min reading some articles and then 30 more going through product listings [1]. To upgrade a core piece of infra for my whole house.
[1] I can already hear people saying "an HOUR???" But guess what now I know about LED bulbs forever.
It's unfortunate many of us are not used to terms like lumens that are objectively better than using terms like wattage.
However I do feel over the past few years they have become much better at displaying the important terms on the front of the package.
Things are not so different now. As it was then, we still have crappy products with too little information and too much marketing. Having CRI ratings on the box is a good change (a spectrogram would have been nice though), I think it cuts down the trial and error it takes to find something suitable. What I don't like are all the built-in specialty lighting sources. More and more we're seeing fixtures with custom LED panels instead of sockets, which often means more expensive trial-and-error when it turns out that expensive "dimmable" ceiling light is doing PWM at 60 Hz, or when it dies one year out of warranty and you have to change the entire decorative housing instead of just replacing a bulb. The good news is that it's easier than ever to ask strangers what worked for them, and it's still less expensive to find and buy high quality LED bulbs than it is to use incandescents.
(don't get me wrong, I like dim lighting, I prefer it, I don't turn lights on when I get up in the morning, I make coffee, I take showers in the dark, people come into spaces that I'm in and always snap the lights on and it drives me crazy. I'm simply saying, when I want to turn a light on to see, I want it to cast a good amount of light.)
(oh, let me add on, I also know that 1 tiny little blue or white LED power indicator on each of a few gadgets I buy seem able to bathe my bedroom in light when I'm trying sleep.)
Recently I even got out the big guns and bought this thing, mainly to replace my halogen floor lamp. It's 40w, and more like the equivalent to a 250w incandescent, though it is awkwardly ginormous.
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4000240793250.html
Man, My brother is a constant light-stepper (he always has on harsh, too bright, lights even when he is not in THAT room, or if he falls asleep.
It drives me nuts!
STOP TURNING ON FLOURESCENT TUBE LIGHTS AND FALLING ASLEEP!!
I recognize the visual acuity, but I cannot stand tube-FLs at all - and while I have every single bulb in my house an addressable RGB LED Alexa bulb (Feit Electric) -- there are certain lights I cant replace (a few ceiling fans with integrated LED lights, tube lights in certain spots, etc) -- I have learned that the position of the lights is also important.
For example, if the kitchen tube light is on, it lasers-into the corner of my eye if I am sitting on the couch at night and the kitchen tube light is on. I cant alexify that just yet (the alexa light switches require a 3-phase (meaning the requirement of a ground wire) to mount -- my house was built in 1959 and the wall switches do not have the req ground wire....
but yeah - its interesting how sensitive you become to the lighting environment once you pay attention to it.
When I was doing architecture, I was always wondering why we paid "lighting designers" so much... but after working with them, and working with lighting in my own home, I am amazed at what they accomplish with lights.
Fortunately, my home has plenty of overhead lighting and a few lamps, so 60w soft white bulbs are sufficient for the other rooms in the house.
Those satisfy my need for super-bright light.
But, I can only find them online.
Per wikipedia[0], there's a vaguely defined unit, the Einstein, which may be defined as the energy in a mole of photons. (The vague definition being because each photon may have different amounts of energy, and thus an Einstein would be some weird function in order to describe total energy.) Wikipedia suggests using measures of Photosynthetically Active Radiation (PAR)[1], like Photosynthetic photon flux (PPF) instead. I suppose this is because PAR is literally defined to measure according to "what plants crave", but it also allows bounding the "total joules of energy" above and below by the PAR wavelength limits.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_(unit)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthetically_active_radi...
Things flickering in the corner of your vision is distracting af.
But then my partner started complaining about headaches reading, but only in certain rooms in the house. I put two and two together and stopped buying a brand of CFL (I might have upgraded to LEDs at this point, I don't recall).
More recent advice was to go to the hardware store and record a slow motion video of the demo bulbs, to see if you can detect flicker during playback, but I think I've only succeeded in that one time and so I'm not sure if it doesn't work as well as advertised or if retailers have gotten better vendors.
(Yes, I know I could search online and order them. It's not that important.)
I've made these my standard lightbulb for any non-dimmable lamp/fixture, so pretty much every light in my house can be dimmed now.
(Any fixture attached to a dimmer gets Philips "Warm Glow" bulbs, which also get warmer as you dim them, and which do a good job of filtering out flicker.)
EU has banned incandescent lights years ago and the situation for LED buyers is much different here. My local drug store chain (Rossmann in Germany) sells 1000lm E27 bulbs under their own Rubin brand with CRI>97 for 4.99€. No flickering and available as 2700K or 4000K. My Opple Light Master 3 even reads CRI 100. So for me right now, it's just going to the drug store and buying a bulb, like before the ban.
Here I find it is very easy to find good LED bulbs with the strength and color profile of my choice and I have used LED in all rooms of my house for the last 10+ years without any failing so far.
You're falling for the "Europe is better than the US, of course" mindset. What you are actually seeing are partisans spinning a narrative to fit their ideology, not an accurate description of reality.
We have really high CRI bulbs here, too, and they're inexpensive. I can go down to the home store and buy them by the dozen. I'll bet you money that bulbs in the US and bulbs in Europe are mostly manufactured in the same place...
I also don't buy the shitty cheap bulbs. I buy mostly Cree's high CRI dimmable bulbs, Phillips high CRI dimmable, or GE high-CRI bulbs if I can't find the Crees (Home Depot stopped carrying them in-store.)
The problem is that both the author and a ton of people in this discussion buy shitty, cheap, no-name bulbs and then they're shocked when they flicker, don't dim well, and fail often.
This whole discussion is a bunch of angry old men yelling at clouds because the guvmint won't allow them to waste 4x as much electricity to light their home.
Even high-CRI bulbs aren't a "perfect" replacement for an incandescent, but the energy savings, especially if you're in an area where you use air conditioning and thus the heat of an incandescent bulb equals more energy usage for cooling, is worth the small sacrifice.
CRI isn't even something you can filter by on their online catalogues. At least the new EU energy labeling let's you see what the specs are.
I bought a stockpile of 150W incandescent bulbs marked as 'shock resistant' (they are definitely not) and they give decent light. The 100W LEDs give more like 50W and flicker too..
It's not allowed to sell incandescent for home use in EU, so they are usually marked as some "industrial shock-resistant" bullshit.
This same reasoning is why I'm not bullish on AI; what the potential is and what we peasants get to use are vastly different
Here is one common vendor: https://store.waveformlighting.com/collections/a19-bulbs/
The issue isn’t that MBAs have cost reduced bulbs for no reason. The issue is that 95% of consumers will only choose the cheap bulbs, period. As a result, that’s what gets produced at scale.
> We know how to mass-produce quality LEDs to the point entire TVs are made of the things.
They’re not the same thing. Displays are optimized for specific R, G, and B color points. White LEDs are optimized for full, smooth spectrums.
And then how do I know that they stick with the high quality approach? What happens when a brand decides to rest on the laurels of their brand name and start slipping in lower quality parts?
- Does not overdrive the LEDs and Does not run power supply components at the limit of what they can. (Thus good longevity)
- Has a current based driver, so that slight voltage shifts from an appliance kicking on don't result in an obvious brightness shift.
- Suitable for use in recessed lighting or enclosed fixtures. (For better or worse, can lights and enclosed fixtures are still relatively common.)
- Makes bulbs in most common shapes like A19, chandelier, and PAR/BR shapes (for recessed lighting fixtures)
- Dimmable (And yes, I am quite well aware that being in conjunction with a current source driver is more complicated, but it is still possible). I'm not even particularly big on dimming, but I am big on smart switches, and many of those include dimming capabilities, and I don't want to worry about which bulbs I put where.
- Good color rendering index (and other similar features)
Even the linked companies products don't meet the full list. Their only dimmable A-series bulbs are the filament bulbs, which are not suitable for all use cases. Similarly, non of the non-filament bulbs in the A series shapes are marked as suitable for use in an enclosure.
As evidence, notice that Philips refuses to sell the Dubai lamp outside Dubai. They are designed for truly long lifetimes, and nobody at Philips want's that.
I did find these tables from Budget Light Forums handy for shopping, however the fact that you have to use these I think only reinforces the point of the article:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/12jj1A6PNjHmWbFNu0FSi...
https://optimizeyourbiology.com/light-bulb-database
edit I learned a bit from a marketing blog article; CRI measures reflection of 8 spot colors but it leaves out some important parts of the spectrum, particularly deep red. https://www.waveformlighting.com/tech/what-is-cri-color-rend...
But yeah, explaining to normal folks that they need $30-$60 lightbulbs for every fixture in their home is basically a non-starter, but for me, I use this lamp every day and it should last a decade or more, so the value prop isn't bad, especially compared to spending $500 or so on something like a Humanscale "nice" desk lamp, which technically has much worse CRI and much lower output.
We recently built our home and went with WAC recessed lighting in all the main areas, which was about a $15k premium over just using what the contractor wanted to use, involved a lighting design company (that was also purchased the fixtures from), and took a dozen+ hours of our time and input, but I think it was worth it in the grand scheme of how much we spent. I personally can't stand hanging out at peoples houses where they have mismatched lights or just very poor lighting; it kills any interior design niceties and makes you really realize how much lighting affects the general feeling of indoor spaces.
The hardware stores near me, both big and small, stock only a single brand of bulb, as if they have some kind of exclusive deal.
Lately I've been using the GE Reveal/Relax. They were better than the contractor grade bulbs that came with the house but still just... wasn't there.
If you know any other manufacturers like this I'd greatly appreciate it if you could provide their links.
Because the big box stores (Walmart, Home Depot or whatever) don't carry expensive stuff with Cree LEDs and solid cooling designs. They carry whatever shit they can get their hands on for as cheap as possible.
And most consumers don't know better, the 1% of consumers that does know orders from Amazon and prays for not getting ripped off by counterfeiters.
I thought full spectrum LEDs are future tech because I haven't seen one.
$200 Canadian (including shipping) for 6 bulbs is stopping me. $33 / bulb with no guarantee how long they will last.
$18 USD for a single 10 Watt bulb? I don't care how expensive electricity is, the $2 incandescent bulb is a better value.
the 4-for-$10 A19 LED bulbs from amazon or ikea are flicker free to my eyes. i've bought some fancy bulbs with big metal heatsink bases, supposed "high CRI" ratings, equivalently high price tags. to my eyes, i can't see the difference. the super-cheap bulbs from one of those amazon marketplace sellers with a randomly generated name are flickery, but just going up to anything other than the absolute bare minimum of quality is good enough. "what the peasants get to use" is because that's actually probably good enough for what us peasants need. if you want to geek out about super high-end LEDs, you're not going to find that in consumer-grade products and that's probably fine.
Very rarely will bulbs visibly flicker in my experience. What happens instead is after several hours I'll start to get headaches and feel fatigue without knowing exactly where it's coming from. Since I replaced my Hue bulbs (which flicker, and I proved it by just using my smartphone camera even) I've felt so much better at home
Apathy towards the consumer, or by the consumer? I don’t think I’m alone when I say that I just buy name brand LED bulbs (usually Phillips) in the color temperature of my choice and am completely satisfied with them. Color rendition is fine, no noticeable flicker, long lifetime. In the past 7 years I haven’t had any fail prematurely, though I’ve replaced some early to change color temperature.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons>
Discussed numerous times on HN: <https://hn.algolia.com/?q=market%20for%20lemons>
To get a market for lemons, the following characteristics are required:
- Nonuniform products or services with widely-varying quality.
- Expensive quality assessment.
- Poor information on relative quality, whether by distortions by sellers or lack of sophistication of buyers, or both.
You find this all over the place, with one notable example being tech recruiting (which appears multiple times in the HN/Algolia search above).
This is also a characteristic which leads to worsening product quality as formerly niche markets expand. Bicycles, audio equipment, and electronics are classic instances of these. A larger market is inherently less sophisticated, and more easily distracted by spurious or irrelevant characteristics of products.
Another tendency is for cargo-culting and fads to develop. That is, as products or services become more complex, a follow-the-herd mentality appears, where (apparently successful) influencers drive follow-on behaviour. Often, of course, the influencers and early-adopters themselves have a poor understanding or capability of distinguishing between high- and low-quality offerings. Given random selection, some will emerge as either successful or lucky over others.
There are some mitigations. In the case of used-car markets, for example, the emergence of vehicle history services (e.g., CarFax), reduces informational asymmetries. In the case of appliances, certification services (e.g., Underwriters Laboratories) and review organisations (e.g., Consumer Reports) aided greatly, as did uniform trade practices such as implied warrantee of fitness and generous return policies (both of which reduce buyers' risk).
As for your assessment of AI's future market, that seems highly probable to me, and would greatly dampen actual positive prospects within the field.
Consumer education is rarely an excellent business opportunity.
Consumers are very good at comparing prices, and "incandescent watt equivalent" labels provide an understandable comparator for light output. Beyond that, the statistics become much less meaningful.
Consumers typically don't read colour temperature ratings (in black-body Kelvin), but instead follow "warm white / soft white / cool white" descriptors. Even still, it's common to see homes with temperature-mismatched lighting.
CRI is a step worse. It is a higher-is-better indicator, but there's no intuitive connection for a consumer. Is a CRI of 80 bad? Is 95 better enough to be worth double the price? Worse yet, CRI is a summary statistic that can gloss over less-measured color reproduction difficulties, and worst yet not all bulbs even publish CRI numbers on the box. My local hardware store is happy to sell you its store-brand generics, none of which have CRI numbers.
Flicker is another step into the unknown. No bulbs that I'm aware of publish flicker numbers, even the otherwise respected names like Philips. If you consider this a 'business opportunity', you're left with an unverifiable claim that your bulbs are uniquely better than the competition.
Sadly, for now good LED lighting really is the domain of the expensive professional or the hobbyist who spends their spare time tracking down reviews or building custom lighting rigs.
As long as we're all shoveling shit, nobody gets a whiff of fresh air.
It's not peasants who's gonna use AI, it's the elite. Peasants are gonna get nothing.
"Good old-fashioned" incandescents were also subject to a multi-decade scam to limit their lifetime: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel
It's manifesting slightly differently this time around, but it's the same principle.
Items have been replaced with poorer quality versions, and the originals become incredibly expensive or impossible to find. Once the downsides of the new version become clear, you are left with obvious and uncounted inflation. It's a mixture of shrink-flation and planned obsolescence.
Examples such as: 100% juice, window blinds, light-bulbs, furniture, vegetables (tomatoes, corn, etc), produce (specifically meat), buildings/building materials.
Until one day you notice you are living in a fake house and eating fake food. And some guy who works for the fed says you have it better than ever because you have a microwave.
Late stage capitalism started in the 80s.
aka capitalism? People prioritize price over quality, but you can't make something better the cheaper it gets. So in an open and "fair" competitive market, all goods and services get shittier over time. It's a race to the bottom.
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Nobody's denying you nice things at low prices just out of spite. Nice things just cost more. To put a positive spin on it, our innate sense of 'nice' is a well tuned heuristic for good engineering (and/or whatever the Joneses can't afford).
[1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09H3VFG8B/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b...
This movement away from standard bulb-sockets to direct wiring is short-term-ism at its finest. Least of all because very time you rewire this, you're going to degrade or shorten the wires.
I've replaced a couple ceiling sockets with panel-type LED fixtures and they're going strong years later. Perhaps they'll fail eventually, but their lifespan has far exceeded anything I've screwed into a socket, so the increased replacement effort/cost has already paid for itself.
I happen to work with a lot of LED light sources nowadays and I can see most problems discussed are related to the light fixture, driver or psychology. More often than not it is the capacitors in these mains powered LEDs that fail first, because the circuit is designed to run at the highest temperature possible to lower the cost of the final product. The bulbs, or LED chips, looks quite innocent in this regard.
So consumers in hot climates who abstain from A/C cooling will suffer such failures disproportionately.
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We've only used LEDs in my country for, what, 15 years now? They are perfectly fine, no issues really, much cheaper than incandescent bulbs of course. We just buy the ones in IKEA and they haven't really failed us so far.
You're familiar with color temperature - that's essentially the orange-blue axis for white light, but there's also a red/green tint axis to consider. Humans vision is most sensitive to green light, and the lumen as a unit is calibrated to human visual sensitivity. You'll never guess what companies trying to add a few more lm/W to their efficiency rating do to the tint. Incidentally, one study I read that doesn't seem to be online anymore found people prefer tints redder than incandescent bulbs.
Flicker can come from running LEDs from AC, resulting in a low-frequency flicker that's very visible to more sensitive people. Incandescent bulbs change brightness much slower, so they're fine on AC. Another possibility is a power supply in the LED bulb that intentionally flickers the LEDs, usually at a higher frequency than mains power in order to control brightness with pulse-width modulation. Flicker-free variable constant current power supplies are available, but tend to be more expensive than PWM.
Finally, color rendering is affected by the spectrum of the light. An incandescent bulb has a spectrum that peaks at a specific wavelength and falls off relatively smoothly to the sides. LEDs can have a wide variety of spectra, often with many peaks and valleys, such that the two light sources viewed directly can look the same, but render colors very differently. A crude measurement of this is color rendering index, and many LEDs advertise theirs. 100 is the highest possible rating, and over 95 is considered very good.
The problem with CRI is it's based on a mere eight color samples, and leaves out some colors LEDs tend to be bad at. It's getting more common to see an R9 (deep red rendering) rating advertised. LEDs often do badly on R9, and there can be a big penalty to efficiency to achieve a high rating. Less commonly advertised, but also a common weakness for LEDs is R12 (deep blue rendering).
I care about this stuff and use an LED videography panel with adjustable color temperature to light my work environment. It's neutral to slightly reddish, flicker-free, has excellent CRI (97) and R9 (98). R12 is a bit weak (82).
It seems like some people are more sensetive to flickering light. I've asked people every now and then when in a group if they can tell the light is flickering, and I'm usually the only one. The effect is pronounced in my peripheral vision and somehow even more when drunk.
I don't think these lights emit the entire spectrum of light either, but a spectrum that "fools" us to think we're seeing the whole spectrum. Maybe that feels uncomfortable for some?
The ikea bulbs I have flicker a little when dimmed, but I don't really mind.
But even so, good LEDs are perfectly fine. Don't assume that all LEDs are crap because you bought one cheap set and they weren't very good.
That's because it is. George W. Bush signed the death warrant for the incandescent bulb in the US in 2007. Incandescent bulbs are a niche product in the US, LEDs have been the mainstream choice for years.