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I don't like the light given off by LEDs. It looks unreal/surreal to me, and makes me uneasy if it's the only light source. Especially the blueish ones. Before

by manmal 10y ago

I don't like the light given off by LEDs. It looks unreal/surreal to me, and makes me uneasy if it's the only light source. Especially the blueish ones. Before installing them I was very enthusiastic about all the benefits of low power lighting, but now I want to switch back to halogen bulbs, or at least very warmly colored LEDs. I'm oversensitive though. E.g. slightly flickering energy saving lamps make me dizzy, exacerbated by ACs making my eyes dry (hello, Ikea). I hope those nano-coated regular light bulbs will become a thing.

copperx 10y ago
Strange. CFLs feel surreal to me but I find LEDs very... Stable feeling?
- manmal 10y ago
  With CFLs, for me, it depends. The cheap or worn out ones tend to flicker ever so slightly (at 50hz where I live), and that's unnerving.
incongruity 10y ago
I'd recommend you look for high-CRI LED bulbs – I've had similar reactions to yours but I'm satisfied with some of the better/higher CRI bulbs(color rendering index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_rendering_index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_rendering_index). They tend to be harder to find, but they're out there. GE Reveal bulbs are higher CRI, for example and I've found other brands through some specialty LED dealers that almost match halogen bulbs.
- ashmud 10y ago
  LEDBenchmark [1] does a good job with their own spectrum and flicker graphs. So far, the LED bulbs I have gotten based on their results have been good. [1] http://www.ledbenchmark.com/ http://www.ledbenchmark.com/
- mark-r 10y ago
  The cheap bulbs I found at Costco are high CRI. I think it was these in a smaller package: http://www.costco.com/Feit-LED-A-Lamp-60W-Replacement-Soft-White-12-Pack-.product.100308157.html http://www.costco.com/Feit-LED-A-Lamp-60W-Replacement-Soft-W...
  - incongruity 10y ago
    That's a great price point for high CRI bulbs – but the reviews on the page you linked to make them sound massively unreliable!
    - mark-r 10y ago
      They might be unreliable, I've had some bad luck with Feit bulbs myself in the past. But if the price is right it might be worth the gamble, it was in my case. My bigger fear is that they're stretching the truth with their CRI number, I don't think there's any independent verification of their claims. There might also be some degradation over time as the phosphors wear out.
- amluto 10y ago
  Be careful, though. Soraa, for example, makes fancy LEDs with CRI 95, and they use violet LEDs behind the phosphor. The problem is that the phosphor lets a decent fraction of the source light through. Soraa even has a nice graph on their spec sheet, and it has a violet peak. Also, a neat fact: all CEC qualified LEDs are high CRI. (P.S. I bought a GE Reveal once and it had the worst color fidelity I've ever seen. Some normally bluish surfaces were distinctly green. I don't understand how it has a high CRI.)
  - lightedman 10y ago
    GE has been busted by myself falsely advertising their UV LED bulbs. In fact, I'm currently looking for more people that bought these A19-style UV Black Light bulbs from GE so we can start a class-action suit for false advertising and unfair competition. In short, I wouldn't trust GE for LEDs. In fact, I'm so disillusioned with almost every company out there (Cree, Philips, GE, Sylvania) that I've simply gone back to building my own lights for my specific purposes. I can't trust any of these companies to be accurate or truthful in their marketing.
    - j_koreth 10y ago
      > that I've simply gone back to building my own lights for my specific purposes. Is this what your username references?
      - lightedman 10y ago
        Yup. I design my own LED units, have a company called SinkPAD (I think it's Adura, now) make the boards, then I populate the boards myself.
        Zak 10y ago
        Maybe you could point me in the right direction. I'm looking to construct a panel that can make it look like day, but has infinite dimming. Making daylight is easy enough. The Nichia 219B LED in 5000K R9050 (CRI 90+, R9 50+) is beautiful. 12-18 of them will comfortably make over 5000 lumens without having to be driven especially hard. It's not terribly hard to come up with options to wire them up and heatsink them properly either. What I haven't been able to find is a suitable power supply and driver. I want to plug it in to 100-240V and have a dimmer knob giving me 5-5000+ lumens via current regulation, not PWM, though very fast (> 10kHz) PWM might be acceptable. Yes, I'm aware the tint will shift a bit through the brightness range without PWM. I'm OK with that.
- mapmap 10y ago
  Parent is correct, high CRI[1] is what you want to look for. I'm embarrassed to reveal how much time and money I've spent down this rabbit hole and ultimately went back to halogen. As you research, you'll discovered that there is in fact more to the single CRI value. It is actually an average measurement of a range of different colors.[2] R9 in particular is the one that is hardest for LEDs to reproduce. Some manufactures goose their CRI value by getting high scores for the other values even though their R9 or R13 (skin tone) is poor. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_rendering_index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_rendering_index [2] http://www.lightology.com/img/howto/cri/cri_2.jpg http://www.lightology.com/img/howto/cri/cri_2.jpg
Reason077 10y ago
The light from good quality LEDs should be indistinguishable from halogens, and better than any CFL. I've replaced my entire household with Philips 2700k LEDs of various types and they are excellent. Poor quality LEDs are awful - the 50/60Hz flicker/strobe effect that many produce is very annoying and fatiguing and it doesn't surprise me that they're considered a health hazard. Try quality LEDs and you won't regret them.
- jacobolus 10y ago
  2700K CCT means that the light from the diode is being mostly absorbed and re-emitted by the yellow phosphor. The lamps people have trouble with are those with a CCT of 4000+K, which emit several times more short-wavelength light for the same perceived brightness. Incandescent lamps are typically ~2500K CCT
- exhilaration 10y ago
  Nice, thanks for the tip. The "Choose your LED color" on the Philips site is pretty good for showing the difference between color temperature: http://www.usa.philips.com/c-m-li/led-lights/warm-led-light http://www.usa.philips.com/c-m-li/led-lights/warm-led-light
- lightedman 10y ago
  Try quality LEDs suggests that there are reputable manufacturers of LED products. Last time I tried Philips Greenpower, they said "40W!" yet the Kill-a-watt showed ~30w and it was nowhere near as bright as an 18w unit some cheapo Chinese maker had. General Electric markets a 7w UV LED - there's one 1W UV LED, and four 1.5W white LEDs, behind a fake woods glass. Yet neither the bulb nor packaging makes note of the white LEDs. It instead says directly on the bulb "395nm UV Light" as if that were all it emitted. Quality certainly doesn't mean Brand-name in this day and age of unscrupulous law-buying companies.
  - jbmorgado 10y ago
    Not only that but about 5 years ago we replaced most of the house with Philips LED lights, most of them failed/are failing by now (they start by getting a darker patch in the bottom of one of the tubes and then it slowly spreads out and the light shuts off completely). 5 years for a product that is advertised as lasting for decades as this usage rate.

by manmal 10y ago

copperx 10y ago

Strange. CFLs feel surreal to me but I find LEDs very... Stable feeling?

manmal 10y ago
With CFLs, for me, it depends. The cheap or worn out ones tend to flicker ever so slightly (at 50hz where I live), and that's unnerving.

incongruity 10y ago

I'd recommend you look for high-CRI LED bulbs – I've had similar reactions to yours but I'm satisfied with some of the better/higher CRI bulbs(color rendering index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_rendering_index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_rendering_index). They tend to be harder to find, but they're out there. GE Reveal bulbs are higher CRI, for example and I've found other brands through some specialty LED dealers that almost match halogen bulbs.

ashmud 10y ago
LEDBenchmark [1] does a good job with their own spectrum and flicker graphs. So far, the LED bulbs I have gotten based on their results have been good. [1] http://www.ledbenchmark.com/ http://www.ledbenchmark.com/
mark-r 10y ago
The cheap bulbs I found at Costco are high CRI. I think it was these in a smaller package: http://www.costco.com/Feit-LED-A-Lamp-60W-Replacement-Soft-White-12-Pack-.product.100308157.html http://www.costco.com/Feit-LED-A-Lamp-60W-Replacement-Soft-W...
- incongruity 10y ago
  That's a great price point for high CRI bulbs – but the reviews on the page you linked to make them sound massively unreliable!
  - mark-r 10y ago
    They might be unreliable, I've had some bad luck with Feit bulbs myself in the past. But if the price is right it might be worth the gamble, it was in my case. My bigger fear is that they're stretching the truth with their CRI number, I don't think there's any independent verification of their claims. There might also be some degradation over time as the phosphors wear out.
amluto 10y ago
Be careful, though. Soraa, for example, makes fancy LEDs with CRI 95, and they use violet LEDs behind the phosphor. The problem is that the phosphor lets a decent fraction of the source light through. Soraa even has a nice graph on their spec sheet, and it has a violet peak. Also, a neat fact: all CEC qualified LEDs are high CRI. (P.S. I bought a GE Reveal once and it had the worst color fidelity I've ever seen. Some normally bluish surfaces were distinctly green. I don't understand how it has a high CRI.)
- lightedman 10y ago
  GE has been busted by myself falsely advertising their UV LED bulbs. In fact, I'm currently looking for more people that bought these A19-style UV Black Light bulbs from GE so we can start a class-action suit for false advertising and unfair competition. In short, I wouldn't trust GE for LEDs. In fact, I'm so disillusioned with almost every company out there (Cree, Philips, GE, Sylvania) that I've simply gone back to building my own lights for my specific purposes. I can't trust any of these companies to be accurate or truthful in their marketing.
  - j_koreth 10y ago
    > that I've simply gone back to building my own lights for my specific purposes. Is this what your username references?
    - lightedman 10y ago
      Yup. I design my own LED units, have a company called SinkPAD (I think it's Adura, now) make the boards, then I populate the boards myself.
      - Zak 10y ago
        Maybe you could point me in the right direction. I'm looking to construct a panel that can make it look like day, but has infinite dimming. Making daylight is easy enough. The Nichia 219B LED in 5000K R9050 (CRI 90+, R9 50+) is beautiful. 12-18 of them will comfortably make over 5000 lumens without having to be driven especially hard. It's not terribly hard to come up with options to wire them up and heatsink them properly either. What I haven't been able to find is a suitable power supply and driver. I want to plug it in to 100-240V and have a dimmer knob giving me 5-5000+ lumens via current regulation, not PWM, though very fast (> 10kHz) PWM might be acceptable. Yes, I'm aware the tint will shift a bit through the brightness range without PWM. I'm OK with that.
mapmap 10y ago
Parent is correct, high CRI[1] is what you want to look for. I'm embarrassed to reveal how much time and money I've spent down this rabbit hole and ultimately went back to halogen. As you research, you'll discovered that there is in fact more to the single CRI value. It is actually an average measurement of a range of different colors.[2] R9 in particular is the one that is hardest for LEDs to reproduce. Some manufactures goose their CRI value by getting high scores for the other values even though their R9 or R13 (skin tone) is poor. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_rendering_index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_rendering_index [2] http://www.lightology.com/img/howto/cri/cri_2.jpg http://www.lightology.com/img/howto/cri/cri_2.jpg

Reason077 10y ago

The light from good quality LEDs should be indistinguishable from halogens, and better than any CFL. I've replaced my entire household with Philips 2700k LEDs of various types and they are excellent. Poor quality LEDs are awful - the 50/60Hz flicker/strobe effect that many produce is very annoying and fatiguing and it doesn't surprise me that they're considered a health hazard. Try quality LEDs and you won't regret them.

jacobolus 10y ago
2700K CCT means that the light from the diode is being mostly absorbed and re-emitted by the yellow phosphor. The lamps people have trouble with are those with a CCT of 4000+K, which emit several times more short-wavelength light for the same perceived brightness. Incandescent lamps are typically ~2500K CCT
exhilaration 10y ago
Nice, thanks for the tip. The "Choose your LED color" on the Philips site is pretty good for showing the difference between color temperature: http://www.usa.philips.com/c-m-li/led-lights/warm-led-light http://www.usa.philips.com/c-m-li/led-lights/warm-led-light
lightedman 10y ago
Try quality LEDs suggests that there are reputable manufacturers of LED products. Last time I tried Philips Greenpower, they said "40W!" yet the Kill-a-watt showed ~30w and it was nowhere near as bright as an 18w unit some cheapo Chinese maker had. General Electric markets a 7w UV LED - there's one 1W UV LED, and four 1.5W white LEDs, behind a fake woods glass. Yet neither the bulb nor packaging makes note of the white LEDs. It instead says directly on the bulb "395nm UV Light" as if that were all it emitted. Quality certainly doesn't mean Brand-name in this day and age of unscrupulous law-buying companies.
- jbmorgado 10y ago
  Not only that but about 5 years ago we replaced most of the house with Philips LED lights, most of them failed/are failing by now (they start by getting a darker patch in the bottom of one of the tubes and then it slowly spreads out and the light shuts off completely). 5 years for a product that is advertised as lasting for decades as this usage rate.