13 ms·

This kind of casual evaluation by a non-expert observer is incredibly meaningless. LEDs have a radically different spectrum from "regular white light". This sho

This kind of casual evaluation by a non-expert observer is incredibly meaningless. LEDs have a radically different spectrum from "regular white light". This shows up in weird looking colors when this light is used in real settings; the fact that the light "looks white" through the lampshade doesn't mean that it won't turn your off-white walls an ugly color, and your sofa, and the skin of your family members. Saying that you "can't tell the difference" when casually looking at the two lamps, during the day in all likelihood, is something that's been done before with a million CFL and LED lamps. It usually doesn't actually hold up. In this case, there doesn't seem to be anything special about the actual LEDs - they just put many of them into a screw-in enclosure, for which they need liquid cooling to remove the heat. If this was about actually saving electricity, and not about "environment theater" and a windfall for a few companies, they'd pass a steep progressive tax on residential electricity use, and let people figure out whether they want to have more efficient bulbs or to turn down their air conditioner, or perhaps just not build a McMansion which needs 1000 lamps to light it in the first place.

rauljara 15y ago
To be fair to the environmentalists who back this legislation: they almost certainly want to pass higher progressive taxes on electricity use. As the current budget debate is showing, it is all but impossible to raise taxes in this political environment. But also, a generic tax on electricity would probably never result in more efficient lightbulbs as they just don't take that up much electricity on a per house basis. People don't change their behavior over $5-20 a month in electricity bills. It's only at a larger scale that you notice the waste. If this were purely a windfall for cfl manufacturers, the law would mandate cfl's. It mandates a minimum efficiency and lets the markets figure it out. If someone builds a better bulb, it will win out. If the casual observation of this article proves correct, this particular bulb will win out. If not, it is only a matter of time before someone builds a bulb that will. The mandate all but guarantees it.
- yaakov34 15y ago
  First, to settle the question about this particular lamp: I found some specs on their website, and they claim a CRI (color rendition index) of 65 for their "neutral" version and 85 for the "warm" version. This is poorer than most modern fluorescents (which people complain about), and the better CRI for the warm version is at the expense of making the light yellow, which many people also don't like. So we're not looking at the at the coming of the savior of efficient light bulbs. For the question of the law, I agree that the savings in electricity are barely measurable, which is why I think it's theater. The huge growth in residential electricity use has been driven by increase in average home size, and by the explosion in the use of air conditioning. Also, it's not even clear that bulbs like this save energy over their lifetime. Sure, one of these theoretically replaces 20 incandescents and uses less electricity, but an incandescent light bulb is just a tiny tungsten wire + steel leads + glass + aluminium base + a drop of epoxy, all made in one factory with extraordinary efficiency that has been polished through 100 years of manufacturing. This thing has 20 LEDs + mounts + cooling tubes + cooling fins on the outside + "non-toxic" liquid + a bunch of electronics for control and dimming + enclosures and wiring for all of the above, made out of plastic and ceramic and glass. All manufactured in probably 20 factories and transported to be assembled in yet another place. If there is a win here for the environment, it's super-tiny.
  - nitrogen 15y ago
    If there is a win here for the environment, it's super-tiny. Presumably the higher environmental costs of the LED bulbs are reflected in their higher retail prices, which are still offset by the savings in electricity (the price of which should eventually come to reflect the environmental cost of generating the electricity).
anigbrowl 15y ago
LEDs have a radically different spectrum from "regular white light" So do incandescents. The good thing about LEDs is that they're easy to tune; they're becoming very popular in the film world because you can make small fixtures that run a long time and that allow a cinematographer to dial in the desired color (via a multicolored array) instead of faffing around with sheets of colored gel, and they are capable of much better spectral power distribution than CFLs. It's not just the tinting and tunability of the LEDs themselves, but also the fact that they put out a steady light instead of CFLs' high-frequency flicker. Even when the color is slightly off from the ideal, the steady light source is much, much easier on the eyes. I'm not ready to endorse these products yet, because their spec sheet just gives a single figure for color temperature. But I'm going to pick one up soon both because it looks cool and because the CFLs I have at home produce really ugly light, so it can hardly be worse. The first thing I'll be doing after ooh-ing and aah-ing over it's retro-modernist design is lining it up against other bulbs and shooting it against calibrated gray cards; I have the gear and skills to measure these things properly. If they're spectacularly good (or bad) I'll write it up. EDIT: BTW LEDs can flicker too. It's probably more accurate to say fluorescent lights have a low frequency flicker since it's often slow enough to be easily seen by eye, especially if you use them with a dimmer switch - in which case the flicker is slow enough to interfere with film shutter speeds, CRTs and so on, giving rise to an unpleasant strobing look. I didn't mean to say that LEDs are completely immune from this, but I have found them vastly easier to work with than fluorescents in a wide variety of situations.
- yaakov34 15y ago
  >> LEDs have a radically different spectrum from "regular white light" > So do incandescents. What do you mean? Incandescents have essentially the perfect black-body spectrum (the effects of the spectrum of tungsten are insignificant). This is what's called a CRI of 100. If you want a bulb with essentially a daylight look, you can get a halogen incandescent, and as a bonus, it's 30% more efficient. LEDs and CFLs don't come near this. > The good thing about LEDs is that they're easy to tune; they're becoming very popular in the film world The problem is that people can't tune the color filtering in each of their rooms with the expertise of a Hollywood cinematographer. If you can test this product, great, but unfortunately, HN doesn't lend itself to this, since the thread will be long dead by the time you have results. I wouldn't expect anything amazing, anyway, since the CRI is not fantastic and the LEDs appear to be standard jobs.
Zak 15y ago
Touring concert lighting designer here (when I'm not coding for money, anyway). The above is absolutely right; LEDs produce a fairly narrow range of colors. If you look at a spectrograph of an incandescent light bulb (including halogen, which is a bit less yellow), you'll see a fairly flat curve that's a bit higher at the red-yellow (and infrared) end and a bit lower at the blue-violet end. If you look at a spectrograph of an LED, you'll see several narrow spikes. If you illuminate objects with LEDs, you'll find that certain colors appear almost cartoonishly vivid, while others that might look similar under incandescent or sunlight appear very dull. An increasing number of small-medium concert venues are switching to lighting that's primarily LED-based, which I find very frustrating since there's not much I can do about the problems it creates. If all the LEDs had the same spectrographs, I could probably convince the performers to wear things that look good under LED light. They don't, of course.

rauljara 15y ago

To be fair to the environmentalists who back this legislation: they almost certainly want to pass higher progressive taxes on electricity use. As the current budget debate is showing, it is all but impossible to raise taxes in this political environment. But also, a generic tax on electricity would probably never result in more efficient lightbulbs as they just don't take that up much electricity on a per house basis. People don't change their behavior over $5-20 a month in electricity bills. It's only at a larger scale that you notice the waste. If this were purely a windfall for cfl manufacturers, the law would mandate cfl's. It mandates a minimum efficiency and lets the markets figure it out. If someone builds a better bulb, it will win out. If the casual observation of this article proves correct, this particular bulb will win out. If not, it is only a matter of time before someone builds a bulb that will. The mandate all but guarantees it.

yaakov34 15y ago
First, to settle the question about this particular lamp: I found some specs on their website, and they claim a CRI (color rendition index) of 65 for their "neutral" version and 85 for the "warm" version. This is poorer than most modern fluorescents (which people complain about), and the better CRI for the warm version is at the expense of making the light yellow, which many people also don't like. So we're not looking at the at the coming of the savior of efficient light bulbs. For the question of the law, I agree that the savings in electricity are barely measurable, which is why I think it's theater. The huge growth in residential electricity use has been driven by increase in average home size, and by the explosion in the use of air conditioning. Also, it's not even clear that bulbs like this save energy over their lifetime. Sure, one of these theoretically replaces 20 incandescents and uses less electricity, but an incandescent light bulb is just a tiny tungsten wire + steel leads + glass + aluminium base + a drop of epoxy, all made in one factory with extraordinary efficiency that has been polished through 100 years of manufacturing. This thing has 20 LEDs + mounts + cooling tubes + cooling fins on the outside + "non-toxic" liquid + a bunch of electronics for control and dimming + enclosures and wiring for all of the above, made out of plastic and ceramic and glass. All manufactured in probably 20 factories and transported to be assembled in yet another place. If there is a win here for the environment, it's super-tiny.
- nitrogen 15y ago
  If there is a win here for the environment, it's super-tiny. Presumably the higher environmental costs of the LED bulbs are reflected in their higher retail prices, which are still offset by the savings in electricity (the price of which should eventually come to reflect the environmental cost of generating the electricity).

anigbrowl 15y ago

LEDs have a radically different spectrum from "regular white light" So do incandescents. The good thing about LEDs is that they're easy to tune; they're becoming very popular in the film world because you can make small fixtures that run a long time and that allow a cinematographer to dial in the desired color (via a multicolored array) instead of faffing around with sheets of colored gel, and they are capable of much better spectral power distribution than CFLs. It's not just the tinting and tunability of the LEDs themselves, but also the fact that they put out a steady light instead of CFLs' high-frequency flicker. Even when the color is slightly off from the ideal, the steady light source is much, much easier on the eyes. I'm not ready to endorse these products yet, because their spec sheet just gives a single figure for color temperature. But I'm going to pick one up soon both because it looks cool and because the CFLs I have at home produce really ugly light, so it can hardly be worse. The first thing I'll be doing after ooh-ing and aah-ing over it's retro-modernist design is lining it up against other bulbs and shooting it against calibrated gray cards; I have the gear and skills to measure these things properly. If they're spectacularly good (or bad) I'll write it up. EDIT: BTW LEDs can flicker too. It's probably more accurate to say fluorescent lights have a low frequency flicker since it's often slow enough to be easily seen by eye, especially if you use them with a dimmer switch - in which case the flicker is slow enough to interfere with film shutter speeds, CRTs and so on, giving rise to an unpleasant strobing look. I didn't mean to say that LEDs are completely immune from this, but I have found them vastly easier to work with than fluorescents in a wide variety of situations.

yaakov34 15y ago
>> LEDs have a radically different spectrum from "regular white light" > So do incandescents. What do you mean? Incandescents have essentially the perfect black-body spectrum (the effects of the spectrum of tungsten are insignificant). This is what's called a CRI of 100. If you want a bulb with essentially a daylight look, you can get a halogen incandescent, and as a bonus, it's 30% more efficient. LEDs and CFLs don't come near this. > The good thing about LEDs is that they're easy to tune; they're becoming very popular in the film world The problem is that people can't tune the color filtering in each of their rooms with the expertise of a Hollywood cinematographer. If you can test this product, great, but unfortunately, HN doesn't lend itself to this, since the thread will be long dead by the time you have results. I wouldn't expect anything amazing, anyway, since the CRI is not fantastic and the LEDs appear to be standard jobs.

Zak 15y ago

Touring concert lighting designer here (when I'm not coding for money, anyway). The above is absolutely right; LEDs produce a fairly narrow range of colors. If you look at a spectrograph of an incandescent light bulb (including halogen, which is a bit less yellow), you'll see a fairly flat curve that's a bit higher at the red-yellow (and infrared) end and a bit lower at the blue-violet end. If you look at a spectrograph of an LED, you'll see several narrow spikes. If you illuminate objects with LEDs, you'll find that certain colors appear almost cartoonishly vivid, while others that might look similar under incandescent or sunlight appear very dull. An increasing number of small-medium concert venues are switching to lighting that's primarily LED-based, which I find very frustrating since there's not much I can do about the problems it creates. If all the LEDs had the same spectrographs, I could probably convince the performers to wear things that look good under LED light. They don't, of course.