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The 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

by eig 4y ago

The 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 should not fault the technology for now giving us too many options, but instead improve the branding and advertising.

iamerroragent 4y ago
Yup. It's unfortunate many of us are not used to terms like lumens that are objectively better than using terms like wattage. However I do feel over the past few years they have become much better at displaying the important terms on the front of the package.
alistairSH 4y ago
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".
- 542458 4y ago
  I've found the color/brightness of the GE Relax HD (Yeah, they go one step further and label the color temperature as "Relax HD") to be pretty good. Lifespan has been hit and miss in semi-enclosed fixtures though.
  - gorkish 4y ago
    Power supplies in all GE bulbs are total horseshit. Their new bulbs with the selectable color temperature gutted the product of its remaining redeeming features. The cost of the extra LEDs in the bulb is coming out of the quality of the remaining components.
- throwthrowuknow 4y ago
  Sure but it’ll cost $100. The efficiency of LEDs is a joke when you factor in materials, manufacturing, and subjective utility. We’re paying more for worse.
  - alistairSH 4y ago
    For a "lifetime" bulb that doesn't make me crazy, I'd gladly pay $100. Well, maybe not quite, but certainly more than whatever I pay now for mid-grade (by HD/Lowes standards) bulbs.
- balfirevic 4y ago
  > But, that single option was at least "good enough" It wasn't if you wanted a good amount of light without having kW heater over your head.
- MBCook 4y ago
  > But, that single option was at least "good enough". Was it? Or was it what we were all used to, good or not, so we accepted it as good/correct.
  - zippergz 4y ago
    Effectively every incandescent bulb has good CRI and can be dimmed, so yes.
- vlunkr 4y ago
  And the single option was cheap. There are cheap LEDs, but they're going to flicker, or hum audibly, and die quickly (contrary to the advertising). It's taken many rounds of trial and error, many wasted dollars, and I still don't love the bulbs I've landed on that much.
- vel0city 4y ago
  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 that's before thinking about how much extra heat I'm adding to my house when I'm spending tons of money running an AC to pump heat out of it. Add up all the rest of the lights in my house, its a lot of money just to have the lights on over a year. For comparison, a similar lumen setup with LED lights in my kitchen runs ~$19/yr to operate. ~13W compared to ~100W. I spent probably less than $80 total swapping out the bulbs and have not had any early failures after a couple of years. The quality of the lights are excellent, in fact in some ways better as I'd prefer closer 5000K in a kitchen as opposed to 2500K.
  - alistairSH 4y ago
    My "good enough" was with regard to light quality. Operating costs are definitely much higher for incandescent bulbs, no question.
- majormajor 4y ago
  They mostly all were pretty awful. Twenty years ago I remember a lot of PR about "full spectrum" incandescents and flourescents - no LEDs then! - there was a lot of talk at the time about Seasonal Affective Disorder. I bought a few different options to check out, and looked at some photo prints under them. They blew the "basic" incandescents away, the photos popped and looked much more lively instead of yellow-tinted and dim.
derbOac 4y ago
I had a similar reaction to the article. I actually am opposed to bans on traditional incandescent bulbs but vastly prefer LEDs and have no desire to go back to them. Using LEDs was a shock to me initially mostly because, as you point out, with traditional household incandescents there wasn't a whole lot of options. So suddenly when I had to pay attention to color profiles and so forth more carefully, I wasn't expecting it. But I don't see that as a bad thing, I really love all the options, and the better precision in labeling color versus power versus brightness. One problem I've noted, that others in the thread are pointing to, is that a lot of shoddy manufacturing has taken advantage of many of the claims of LED technology to push unacceptable products. One of my pet peeves is how I've suddenly seen fixtures with integrated bulbs take over lighting departments, poorly constructed and forcing you to remove the entire fixture rather than just the bulb, when it dies after a year, much earlier than promised. But I guess even there it's just moved me to more selective lighting stores where I can still buy better fixtures separately from the bulbs. I do think there's something to be said about declines or fraud in lightbulb manufacturing quality compared to what is possible, but I see that as a scourge of our age and not something unique to LEDs. I have as much trouble finding a quality lightbulb as I do a quality pair of pants.
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
  > I actually am opposed to bans on traditional incandescent bulbs AFAIK, there are no simple bans on them [ EDIT: in the USA ]. What exists are energy performance standards, which these bulbs do not meet. If you want, you can say that this is nit-picking, and that of course that's a ban. But when we have energy performance standards for, say, cars, nobody says it is a ban on cars, just a effective end to the production of inefficient ones.
  - Spivak 4y ago
    Where the standards are set isn’t arbitrary. If LEDs were exactly as efficient as incandescent bulbs there wouldn’t be a law that bans all lightbulbs. Also there’s no way a law would pass that sets the efficiency standard of incandescent bulbs because the law would do nothing. It’s a ban on incandescent bulbs with the thinnest veneer of generalization.
nickthegreek 4y ago
I think it was worse in the past. I had to chose a daylight, warm or soft bulb. Now I buy one bulb capable of changing color temp and brightness from my couch and it lasts way longer. This is exactly the kinda thing sci fi had when I was a kid and now its in every room of my house.
the_af 4y ago
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"?
- s_dev 4y ago
  >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?
  - ghaff 4y ago
    I think it does? I go into a home improvement store, grab a dimmable bulb on the warmer side, and screw it in. That's pretty much the sum total of my dealing with LED bulbs.
    - nix0n 4y ago
      The problem is that the "dimmable" LEDs I have aren't actually dimmable, they just get flickery. The article has a similar sentiment: it's hard to translate from what the box says to how it'll actually perform in the real world.
  - tomjen3 4y ago
    Because EU banned the free market. The ideal would have been a slow transition where LEDs would have had to compete with bulbs. Like the others I want to buy an LED where the visible light cannot be meassured differently from a normal one, and with the guarantee that I can return it for a full refund if it fails before the 20k hours are up.
    - fl0id 4y ago
      The free market will never fix that, because there is no profit in making it easy for you, nor in offering an unlimited return.
fsh 4y ago
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.
- PaulHoule 4y ago
  Most people have an expectation that residential lighting is on the "warm" (low color temperature!) side. I have a lot of Hue and Sengled bulbs in the house which are tunable and my son complains that they look "harsh" when they are set to a high color temperature. Myself I do art projects that require making fine sensory distinctions and it clear to me that I can do that better with more blue light. I've seen high-quality incandescent bulbs however that do very well on my tests despite being "warm" but I think a lot of people like using daylight from out the north window for evaluating prints and it was was a revolution a few decades back when art museums realized that higher color temperature lights brought out colors better.
  - nonethewiser 4y ago
    > Myself I do art projects that require making fine sensory distinctions and it clear to me that I can do that better with more blue light. That’s what it’s good for. But do you want that lighting in your living room while you watch tv?
    - PaulHoule 4y ago
      The TV is a good example because the light from TV is transmitted light, like a stained glass window. The TV can create the widest range of perceptual experience if it has R, G and B colors that are precise spectral lines. If I'm looking at color prints in a book or on the wall that is reflective light and it is dependent on the spectrum of the room. My main TV room has RGB Hue lights that can simulate "warm" or "cold" light but also specific colors. I think 100% green is the ideal light for hot summer days because a full spectrum is also coming in the windows and it gives the most light for the minimum amount of heat. I also find other colors fun sometimes. The guest room that also has a TV has sengled lights that can be tuned from cool to warm. RGB lights that can produce saturated colors are not going to render reflective colors so well, see https://blog.kasson.com/the-last-word/metameric-failure/ https://blog.kasson.com/the-last-word/metameric-failure/ Personally I like high color temperature light but with the system we have we can have it any way we like. If I really need accurate color rendition I bring in high-performing spot incandescent and maybe someday LEDs. My work is all "born digital" so I spend at least 80% of my time looking at screens and looking at prints, handling paper and such is a small but essential fraction of that. What I really gotta do though is set my system up so it can vary the room color together with what's on TV, that ought to be cool.

by eig 4y ago

iamerroragent 4y ago

Yup. It's unfortunate many of us are not used to terms like lumens that are objectively better than using terms like wattage. However I do feel over the past few years they have become much better at displaying the important terms on the front of the package.

alistairSH 4y ago

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".

542458 4y ago
I've found the color/brightness of the GE Relax HD (Yeah, they go one step further and label the color temperature as "Relax HD") to be pretty good. Lifespan has been hit and miss in semi-enclosed fixtures though.
- gorkish 4y ago
  Power supplies in all GE bulbs are total horseshit. Their new bulbs with the selectable color temperature gutted the product of its remaining redeeming features. The cost of the extra LEDs in the bulb is coming out of the quality of the remaining components.
throwthrowuknow 4y ago
Sure but it’ll cost $100. The efficiency of LEDs is a joke when you factor in materials, manufacturing, and subjective utility. We’re paying more for worse.
- alistairSH 4y ago
  For a "lifetime" bulb that doesn't make me crazy, I'd gladly pay $100. Well, maybe not quite, but certainly more than whatever I pay now for mid-grade (by HD/Lowes standards) bulbs.
balfirevic 4y ago
> But, that single option was at least "good enough" It wasn't if you wanted a good amount of light without having kW heater over your head.
MBCook 4y ago
> But, that single option was at least "good enough". Was it? Or was it what we were all used to, good or not, so we accepted it as good/correct.
- zippergz 4y ago
  Effectively every incandescent bulb has good CRI and can be dimmed, so yes.
vlunkr 4y ago
And the single option was cheap. There are cheap LEDs, but they're going to flicker, or hum audibly, and die quickly (contrary to the advertising). It's taken many rounds of trial and error, many wasted dollars, and I still don't love the bulbs I've landed on that much.
vel0city 4y ago
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 that's before thinking about how much extra heat I'm adding to my house when I'm spending tons of money running an AC to pump heat out of it. Add up all the rest of the lights in my house, its a lot of money just to have the lights on over a year. For comparison, a similar lumen setup with LED lights in my kitchen runs ~$19/yr to operate. ~13W compared to ~100W. I spent probably less than $80 total swapping out the bulbs and have not had any early failures after a couple of years. The quality of the lights are excellent, in fact in some ways better as I'd prefer closer 5000K in a kitchen as opposed to 2500K.
- alistairSH 4y ago
  My "good enough" was with regard to light quality. Operating costs are definitely much higher for incandescent bulbs, no question.
majormajor 4y ago
They mostly all were pretty awful. Twenty years ago I remember a lot of PR about "full spectrum" incandescents and flourescents - no LEDs then! - there was a lot of talk at the time about Seasonal Affective Disorder. I bought a few different options to check out, and looked at some photo prints under them. They blew the "basic" incandescents away, the photos popped and looked much more lively instead of yellow-tinted and dim.

derbOac 4y ago

I had a similar reaction to the article. I actually am opposed to bans on traditional incandescent bulbs but vastly prefer LEDs and have no desire to go back to them. Using LEDs was a shock to me initially mostly because, as you point out, with traditional household incandescents there wasn't a whole lot of options. So suddenly when I had to pay attention to color profiles and so forth more carefully, I wasn't expecting it. But I don't see that as a bad thing, I really love all the options, and the better precision in labeling color versus power versus brightness. One problem I've noted, that others in the thread are pointing to, is that a lot of shoddy manufacturing has taken advantage of many of the claims of LED technology to push unacceptable products. One of my pet peeves is how I've suddenly seen fixtures with integrated bulbs take over lighting departments, poorly constructed and forcing you to remove the entire fixture rather than just the bulb, when it dies after a year, much earlier than promised. But I guess even there it's just moved me to more selective lighting stores where I can still buy better fixtures separately from the bulbs. I do think there's something to be said about declines or fraud in lightbulb manufacturing quality compared to what is possible, but I see that as a scourge of our age and not something unique to LEDs. I have as much trouble finding a quality lightbulb as I do a quality pair of pants.

PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
> I actually am opposed to bans on traditional incandescent bulbs AFAIK, there are no simple bans on them [ EDIT: in the USA ]. What exists are energy performance standards, which these bulbs do not meet. If you want, you can say that this is nit-picking, and that of course that's a ban. But when we have energy performance standards for, say, cars, nobody says it is a ban on cars, just a effective end to the production of inefficient ones.
- Spivak 4y ago
  Where the standards are set isn’t arbitrary. If LEDs were exactly as efficient as incandescent bulbs there wouldn’t be a law that bans all lightbulbs. Also there’s no way a law would pass that sets the efficiency standard of incandescent bulbs because the law would do nothing. It’s a ban on incandescent bulbs with the thinnest veneer of generalization.

nickthegreek 4y ago

I think it was worse in the past. I had to chose a daylight, warm or soft bulb. Now I buy one bulb capable of changing color temp and brightness from my couch and it lasts way longer. This is exactly the kinda thing sci fi had when I was a kid and now its in every room of my house.

the_af 4y ago

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"?

s_dev 4y ago
>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?
- ghaff 4y ago
  I think it does? I go into a home improvement store, grab a dimmable bulb on the warmer side, and screw it in. That's pretty much the sum total of my dealing with LED bulbs.
  - nix0n 4y ago
    The problem is that the "dimmable" LEDs I have aren't actually dimmable, they just get flickery. The article has a similar sentiment: it's hard to translate from what the box says to how it'll actually perform in the real world.
- tomjen3 4y ago
  Because EU banned the free market. The ideal would have been a slow transition where LEDs would have had to compete with bulbs. Like the others I want to buy an LED where the visible light cannot be meassured differently from a normal one, and with the guarantee that I can return it for a full refund if it fails before the 20k hours are up.
  - fl0id 4y ago
    The free market will never fix that, because there is no profit in making it easy for you, nor in offering an unlimited return.

fsh 4y ago

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.

PaulHoule 4y ago
Most people have an expectation that residential lighting is on the "warm" (low color temperature!) side. I have a lot of Hue and Sengled bulbs in the house which are tunable and my son complains that they look "harsh" when they are set to a high color temperature. Myself I do art projects that require making fine sensory distinctions and it clear to me that I can do that better with more blue light. I've seen high-quality incandescent bulbs however that do very well on my tests despite being "warm" but I think a lot of people like using daylight from out the north window for evaluating prints and it was was a revolution a few decades back when art museums realized that higher color temperature lights brought out colors better.
- nonethewiser 4y ago
  > Myself I do art projects that require making fine sensory distinctions and it clear to me that I can do that better with more blue light. That’s what it’s good for. But do you want that lighting in your living room while you watch tv?
  - PaulHoule 4y ago
    The TV is a good example because the light from TV is transmitted light, like a stained glass window. The TV can create the widest range of perceptual experience if it has R, G and B colors that are precise spectral lines. If I'm looking at color prints in a book or on the wall that is reflective light and it is dependent on the spectrum of the room. My main TV room has RGB Hue lights that can simulate "warm" or "cold" light but also specific colors. I think 100% green is the ideal light for hot summer days because a full spectrum is also coming in the windows and it gives the most light for the minimum amount of heat. I also find other colors fun sometimes. The guest room that also has a TV has sengled lights that can be tuned from cool to warm. RGB lights that can produce saturated colors are not going to render reflective colors so well, see https://blog.kasson.com/the-last-word/metameric-failure/ https://blog.kasson.com/the-last-word/metameric-failure/ Personally I like high color temperature light but with the system we have we can have it any way we like. If I really need accurate color rendition I bring in high-performing spot incandescent and maybe someday LEDs. My work is all "born digital" so I spend at least 80% of my time looking at screens and looking at prints, handling paper and such is a small but essential fraction of that. What I really gotta do though is set my system up so it can vary the room color together with what's on TV, that ought to be cool.