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Investing in lighting did great things for my mental and physical health

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Re: Investing in lighting did great things for my mental and physical health

#221

Post by tedmiston »

marvin wrote: post #160
lawkwok wrote: post #7

Phillips Hue lights are something you think is a luxury until you get them. The ability to have light change colour temperature or dim depending on the time is so calming. Whenever I revert back to the non—colour-temperature-adjusted light, I feel like I’m in an operating room. The only thing I would note is that they are dimmer than regular lights. Having dim lights in the middle of the day really makes me sleepy.

I’ve tried out LIFX, and they’re pretty decent. But I’m unhappy with the spectrum of their deep, low-intensity reds. They don’t go far enough into the long-wavelength. I use this at night, before sleep. Ditto with their pure whites; haven’t measured the spectrum but feels like they don’t manage to approximate sunlight in color rendering. Granted, the bulb I have only goes between blue-white and red. Anyone been think…

I tried LIFX briefly a long time ago, but try a Hue color bulb. They go very red. (I use all Hue Color bulbs.)

Re: Investing in lighting did great things for my mental and physical health

#222

Post by crispyambulance »

eropple wrote: post #195
crispyambulance wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's another problem with many these smart lights, IMHO. A lightbulb should be a long-lasting, easily replaceable thing. Putting in all sorts of doodads into the base of lightbulb just strikes me as wasteful and a recipe for a brittle configuration. It's bad enough putting in a power converter, now we're talking about RF transceivers, computers, webservers, and REST API's. All this packed into a tiny very hot spac…

> You can then put all the internet-of-things jazz into THAT BOX and not in each light. How do you propose to do this in a lamp or a can light with a standard light socket? Should I rip open my ceiling and add control wires to every can that's in there? These bulbs don't have the smarts in them just because nobody thought of doing otherwise. The world is mostly made of legacy infrastructure. Hue will sell you lamps t…

> Should I rip open my ceiling and add control wires to every can that's in there?

Yes. Eventually. Or, more practically, do it right in new construction.

Re: Investing in lighting did great things for my mental and physical health

#223

Post by thunkshift1 »

ehnto wrote: post #120
benreesman wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even 4k is a huge step up from what I had been using which was just whatever. Getting up to a modern DPI is a game changer right?

Not to assume you play games or watch YouTube, but on low DPI you also don't realise what you are missing in detail. Entire objects reveal themselves in this new space between the pixels. Where once was a splodge is now a person far off into the distance. You could almost liken low DPI to being near sighted, which I also am. Once you hit higher DPI suddenly you can see the view far off into the distance clearly. I ha…

What dpi is considered high or good

Re: Investing in lighting did great things for my mental and physical health

#224

Post by dbttdft »

Jaruzel wrote: post #151
dbttdft wrote: post #104

"Edison bulb" refers to a style and not anything to do with the quality of light. And you will probably get LED and a buggy one at that. Get incandescents, never ever use CFL because they look terrible and will make you want to kill yourself. Only get LED if you need cold color temperature, and know what you're doing enough to avoid flicker and other LED problems like bad color rendering. Half of LEDs will flicker ev…

> Get incandescents In the UK, and in the EU, standard bulb incandescents are no longer being imported and the current stock is all there is, and as you say CFLs are horrible. So the options left are halogen (just as bad as CFL imho) or LED. I've resisted LED for ages, but now it seems they are finally good enough to replace incandescents.

> So the options left are halogen

I don't think they are as bad as CFL. CFL have really cold dim light with some other phenomena going on. I have seen LEDs that are, though.

> but now it seems they are finally good enough to replace incandescents.

Certainly not on average. Half the time I encounter an LED I notice that it flickers, even without a dimmer. I just bought 4 for $50 thinking I paid enough to get a non-bullshit product, and they flicker and I will have to go try the $60 one next.

Re: Investing in lighting did great things for my mental and physical health

#225

Post by kmos17 »

elabajaba wrote: post #220
kmos17 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience the ikea bulbs are also awful, constant unpairing requiring multiple attempts to re-pair with the remote, especially if you have multiple bulbs in close proximity. In the end I gave up and just use them as normal bulbs. It would be a nice setup if it worked though, having a dedicated remote control is much more convenient than using a phone imo.

Damn, I was hoping they'd be a good hue alternative because I don't want to pay hue prices. I was looking at nanoleaf as they're using Thread, but they don't have any basic bridges (only homekit, eero, or one of their rgb wall panel things, none of which are things I want) and won't speak Matter. At this point I feel like I might as well wait for Matter bridges to come out this fall, as hopefully companies will refre…

The ikea setup might be worth a shot with the networking bridge they have to control multiple bulbs at once, but my experience with individual bulbs was bad.

Re: Investing in lighting did great things for my mental and physical health

#226

Post by eropple »

crispyambulance wrote: post #222
eropple wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can then put all the internet-of-things jazz into THAT BOX and not in each light. How do you propose to do this in a lamp or a can light with a standard light socket? Should I rip open my ceiling and add control wires to every can that's in there? These bulbs don't have the smarts in them just because nobody thought of doing otherwise. The world is mostly made of legacy infrastructure. Hue will sell you lamps t…

> Should I rip open my ceiling and add control wires to every can that's in there? Yes. Eventually. Or, more practically, do it right in new construction.

So now there are two standards that are mutually exclusive--"works in every light made in the last hundred years" and "the other one".

I sense great commercial success here, telling people to run LV to every HV can light. And how about--you know--a lamp? Like the one standing on my floor right now, with nowhere to place an external box? Should we redesign them all for this new standard that doesn't address actual pain points? How do we power the control boxed? Does every lamp now have a chaining 120V and you need to hang an AC adapter off it, then weasel control wires into the lamp shade? Or do we expect them to output 12V in case you want to run them with automated controls? Or do we expect them to just pick a vendor, build in their control box and you throw out the lamp if the software sucks? In a lamp?

This solves a problem people don't have through the time-tested strategy of making people think more, do more work, and be more annoyed. I think I'm seeing why it doesn't exist.

Re: Investing in lighting did great things for my mental and physical health

#227

Post by crispyambulance »

eropple wrote: post #226
crispyambulance wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Should I rip open my ceiling and add control wires to every can that's in there? Yes. Eventually. Or, more practically, do it right in new construction.

So now there are two standards that are mutually exclusive--"works in every light made in the last hundred years" and "the other one". I sense great commercial success here, telling people to run LV to every HV can light. And how about--you know--a lamp? Like the one standing on my floor right now, with nowhere to place an external box? Should we redesign them all for this new standard that doesn't address actual pai…

I am talking about permanent fixtures here. And anyway, there ARE 12VDC lights without a bunch of electronics junk inside them. They're readily available for folks and designers who want _really_ _nice_ lighting.

Re: Investing in lighting did great things for my mental and physical health

#228

Post by hulitu »

elabajaba wrote: post #119
sampo wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand the LIFX bulbs can be picky about the wifi connection. I think this explains most of the problems people have with them.

You'd think being in the same room as a Unifi UAP AC Pro in a non crowded area with a dedicated 2.4ghz ssid would fix those wifi issues, but it didn't.

Maybe they use the same wifi channel.

Re: Investing in lighting did great things for my mental and physical health

#229

Post by eropple »

crispyambulance wrote: post #227
eropple wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So now there are two standards that are mutually exclusive--"works in every light made in the last hundred years" and "the other one". I sense great commercial success here, telling people to run LV to every HV can light. And how about--you know--a lamp? Like the one standing on my floor right now, with nowhere to place an external box? Should we redesign them all for this new standard that doesn't address actual pai…

I am talking about permanent fixtures here. And anyway, there ARE 12VDC lights without a bunch of electronics junk inside them. They're readily available for folks and designers who want _really_ _nice_ lighting.

Having different protocols for inbuilts and furnishings does not seem like a recipe for success.

(And yes, I know about 12VDC lights; I have a studio full of them, with DMX controls. They're not consumer-friendly.)

Re: Investing in lighting did great things for my mental and physical health

#230

Post by pflanze »

layer8 wrote: post #200
was_a_dev wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a way to tell if an LED bulb doesn't flicker

Slow-motion video recording.

It's also easy to see when you move your hands quickly back and forth in front of a dark background with fingers spread apart, instead of the fingers being blurred you'll see their image repeated distinctly many times (like a fan).
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