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There's something off about LED bulbs

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Re: There's something off about LED bulbs

#691

Post by [deleted] »

leobg wrote: post #640
Self-Perfection wrote: post #581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One guy bought over 4 thousands LED lamps over years, meticulously measured their actual specs and made a huge online catalog https://lamptest.ru/ I follow his project a bit and it looks like consumers are really at loss. Generally there is no reliable way to choose a good led lamp without consulting such catalog. Lamps packaging often lies about actual specs, lamps with the same packaging but manufactured in differe…

Great site. I wish he had an English translation. But I forgive him. This is what the Internet should be! Individual people who do one thing really well. So happy to see that this still exists online.

[deleted]

Re: There's something off about LED bulbs

#692

Post by slaymaker1907 »

globular-toast wrote: post #660
cal85 wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bein…

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.

I think PWM can be used with success if the frequency is high enough. https://www.dxomark.com/flicker-the-display-affliction/ claims that most people should be ok with PWM above 250Hz.

Re: There's something off about LED bulbs

#693

Post by davidmurdoch »

tomtheelder wrote: post #651
davidmurdoch wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps it's the 50 year old house I live in, but lots of Phillips brand, also whatever the Lowes and Home Depot in-house brands are. I bought Kree in bulk for my last house about 10 years ago and that was a huge mistake. As for the color reproduction issue... you do experience it, I imagine you haven't done color critical work under incandescent and then under LEDs? I do have some stupidly expensive $29 D-50 complia…

> As for the color reproduction issue... you do experience it, I imagine you haven't done color critical work under incandescent and then under LEDs? High quality LEDs with a good CRI are vastly better for that sort of work. You don't want to be doing anything like that under 2700k incandescent light.

Well yeah, that's why I said I have $29 D-50 compliant LEDs in my office. Though CRI, to an extent is more important than color temperature, since with high CRI under warm light you can still get a great sense for relative colors and contrast, but not so much with a mediocre CRI under a daylight bulb.

I'm not an LED hater. But I do think the Lightbulb industry has taken advantage of us in not so honest ways, as expected by their shareholders.

Re: There's something off about LED bulbs

#694

Post by alistairSH »

vel0city wrote: post #372
alistairSH wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

My "good enough" was with regard to light quality. Operating costs are definitely much higher for incandescent bulbs, no question.

Re: There's something off about LED bulbs

#695

Post by Semaphor »

Is there something different about smart bulbs? My oldest hue is at least 6 years old, but probably older (as I can't find the order confirmation for the bridge, so I'm guessing I bought it offline), no flickering, no getting darker.

Logically, I'm thinking that the pure LED components are a much smaller part of the price, and that maybe there is less skimping?

Re: There's something off about LED bulbs

#696

Post by seszett »

eimrine wrote: post #425
rini17 wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is true only for white LEDs. The RGB strip does not have them (there are some that include white LEDs but not this one). If you set it to yellow, only pure red and green elements are on, blue elements are completely off.

There is no such thing as a pure red LED. Those are blue ones but with light filters. If you don't see blue which is actually present and you see deep red which is actually absent then maybe consider yourself as brainwashed by marketologists.

I think you misunderstand the fundamental difference between "white" LEDs which are generally a blue LED associated with various phosphors that convert the monochromatic blue light into a mostly continuous spectrum going from blue to red, and the monochromatic R, G and B LEDs that each emit a fairly narrow band that is either red (with no blue or green at all) green (no blue or red) or blue (no red or green).

Blue LEDs are used to create white because it's easier to convert blue to lower frequencies. But red and green LEDs absolutely exist. LEDs exist for a wide range of narrow wavelengths, including for example infrared LEDs that emit at 940 nm without a trace of blue (obviously, otherwise they would be visible!).

Re: There's something off about LED bulbs

#697

Post by hinkley »

aimor wrote: post #633

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 o…

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.

Re: There's something off about LED bulbs

#698

Post by hinkley »

tomatotomato37 wrote: post #150

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 th…

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.

Re: There's something off about LED bulbs

#699

Post by Forgeties79 »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #228
tomatotomato37 wrote: post #150

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 th…

You can go buy high CRI, high quality bulbs right now. Nothing is stopping you. 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 T…

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.

Re: There's something off about LED bulbs

#700

Post by ClumsyPilot »

zaroth wrote: post #490
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you can do the research to find those brands and pay extra for them This is such a lie - no, you can't do the research. There are no reseatch papers conparing consumer products Doing the research means buying everything avaliable on the market and testing it yourself. Googling is not research, its choosing which SEO'd fraudulent article will lie to you today. Quality is going to shit, because there is no way to twl…

I mean… just here in this comment section are suggestions for suppliers of premium LEDs that I would trust based on the karma rating of the people who posted the links. Googling for “premium LED high ratings 95 cri” or searching on Amazon definitely isn’t going to work, because they will just send you to the highest bidder, or the most proficient scammer.

The comment section is great , but if I need to find out quality of a random consumer product, what is the chance I will find it in this comment section? like 1%?
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