I've never even seen a LED bulb that wasn't 2700K. Also, do some bulb packs not list the incandescent equivalent wattage in addition to the Lumens?
There's something off about LED bulbs
81–90 of 966 posts
Re: There's something off about LED bulbs
#82I really like LED bulbs and use them everywhere I can. Unfortunately they suffer the same as anything that is forced by congress rather than evolving at the natural pace and replacing standard lighting sources when the technology is mature enough. Take for instance cell phones. They replaced landlines and were adopted by users because the technology was ready and they were better than the product they replaced. Imagine if congress had outlawed landlines. Same can be said for EV’s. IC vehicles are better in almost every aspect yet congress is doing everything it can to force their obsolescence before their time. The problem with that is that every time they do something like that they chip away at their credibility and when some real emergency comes along we the people aren’t so easily fooled.
Re: There's something off about LED bulbs
#83There'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 wit…
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.
Re: There's something off about LED bulbs
#84The 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 sh…
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"?
>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"?
That sounds like an ideal situation the free market should be fixing -- so why isn't it?
Re: There's something off about LED bulbs
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not to mention space constraints for power supplies, and cooling the LEDs enough. For all the benefits of LED lights, incandescent bulbs are infinitely simpler.
> cooling the LEDs enough 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!
But LEDs are very sensitive to heat, so even the small amount of heat will cause gradual dimming.
Re: There's something off about LED bulbs
#86This is weird. I buy the most basic Dollar Tree LED bulbs for every outlet in my home and I haven't had any of the problems in the article (for about 4 years so far). Occasionally one will blow then I just toss in another dollar bulb (maybe 4-5 so far). The light color and "quality" is perfect too. Granted, I don't have any fancy dimmer switches or anything but hey, maybe try the basic Dollar Tree bulbs :)
Re: There's something off about LED bulbs
#87The 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 sh…
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.
Re: There's something off about LED bulbs
#88I really like LED bulbs and use them everywhere I can. Unfortunately they suffer the same as anything that is forced by congress rather than evolving at the natural pace and replacing standard lighting sources when the technology is mature enough. Take for instance cell phones. They replaced landlines and were adopted by users because the technology was ready and they were better than the product they replaced. Imagi…
I think things like price pressure/ consumers just buying the cheapest bulb possible happens regardless.
Re: There's something off about LED bulbs
#89Cheap LED bulbs generate the worst light I’ve ever experienced. But after some research I found that there are options that make a nice warm light with no perceptible flickering.
Personally I prefer the phillips warm glow dimmable bulbs
Re: There's something off about LED bulbs
#90My benchmark for light quality is "can I tell the difference between the two sides of
https://www.redrivercatalog.com/browse/60lb-polar-matte.html
?" and I'd say that LED bulbs do OK when I set them on the high color temperature (blueish) settings and poorly on the warm color temperature side. This company
https://www.solux.net/cgi-bin/tlistore/index.html
became famous for high color temperature lights for art museums also used to make an advanced incandescent bulb that had something like a halogen bulb inside of it. Those bulbs do really well on my test, I still have a stock of them, and I use them when I need to make fine color distinctions. I've seen bulbs with a similar construction for sale at Dollar General but I haven't tested them.
Note there is a tradeoff between an RGB bulb that gives really saturated colors and one that gives good color rendition. If saturation was what mattered you'd want laser-like spectral lines, for color rendition you want each component to have a broad spectrum.
There's no reason why LED light can't have excellent quality however anyone defines quality because you're not limited to the raw output of the LED but you can tune the output with a phosphor. Consumers have to demand something better though and the market has to respond.