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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-b

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/ 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 TVs are made of the things. They’re not the same thing. Displays are optimized for specific R, G, and B color points. White LEDs are optimized for full, smooth spectrums.

causality0 4y ago
Is there anything decent in the middle? Somewhere between one dollar bulbs and eighteen dollar bulbs?
- pkulak 4y ago
  I've been happy with my Cree leds. I can't seem to find them online, only Home Depot.
  - nevir 4y ago
    Home Depot has an exclusively agreement with em
- jghn 4y ago
  I used to buy Cree bulbs. But they they sold the brand and were changed to be the same mass market schlock as the other bulbs, except with a name brand that implies quality.
soulofmischief 4y ago
99% of white LEDs on the market arhave anything but full, smooth spectrums. Most of my lighting is from waveform lighting but you have to pay the premium for full spectrum, plus you have to shell out for expensive dimmers if you don't want flickering.
cratermoon 4y ago
You can, but as GP comment said, "Good indoor lighting is now something only people with plenty of disposable income can afford." When you're poor, are you going to cough up $18 for a single bulb, or get a 16-pack for $24 at Home Depot? $288 vs $24.
- Dylan16807 4y ago
  So "is now something" implies that incandescent was affordable. 16 incandescent bulbs, averaging 3 hours per day, would cost about 50 cents per day. $150-$250 per year in most of the country. So getting the really premium LEDs is still cheaper than lighting used to be. Even better if you use the good bulbs for room lighting and the cheap bulbs for closets and outdoors and such.
  - cratermoon 4y ago
    This is not how poor people are able to manage money. When you're living paycheck-to-paycheck, you don't buy $18 bulbs, ever. That $18 is needed for rent, food, and utilities.
    - Dylan16807 4y ago
      > That $18 is needed for rent, food, and utilities. You say that like the utilities weren't even larger before the change. That $11-18 a month is explicitly not going to utilities. I'd say those people are getting an upgrade in food or other things at the cost of CRI. And they can choose not to take that trade if they prefer CRI. You only need to buy one bulb at a time, after all, no need for massive savings. And even if you buy the extra fancy $18 bulbs you'll still save some money compared to incandescent.
jghn 4y ago
The big problem for me is, as a consumer, how do I know that brand X is producing quality bulbs that'll last a long time? I'm very happy to pay more for that. How does one sift through marketing to get to actual quality? And then how do I know that they stick with the high quality approach? What happens when a brand decides to rest on the laurels of their brand name and start slipping in lower quality parts?
- jchw 4y ago
  Some bulbs will give you information on their CRI which ideally should be required to be labeled on the bulbs packaging the way calorie information is required on food packaging (but I don't think it is.) That will tell you roughly how good the quality of the light is by proxy of the spectrum of light it covers. On the other hand, there is no equivalent afaik for knowing how well the power supply is designed or how hard the LEDs are driven. I guess for that, the consumer can turn to the trusted source for this kind of information, bigclivedotcom. (Sarcasm; but seriously, this is a problem.)
  - terr-dav 4y ago
    An important point in the article is that CRI for LED bulbs does not meaningfully map to the light quality. >Oh, but: Experts agree that the color-rendering index doesn’t really index how colors are rendered. Some bulbs with a 90 CRI make things look wan; some with an 80 are passable. There are better, more useful metrics, but you can’t have them. Nobody puts them on the packaging. One lighting professional — an LED advocate, no less — told me he sometimes calls up the manufacturer and asks to talk to an engineer to get the real specs.
    - jchw 4y ago
      Yes that's a good point, there's definitely more to it than just CRI. That said, a bulb with very poor CRI definitely sucks, so it's not entirely useless. This seems like one of those things that will suck until it doesn't.
    - mech987987 4y ago
browningstreet 4y ago
As consumers are we really supposed to do a ton of research on light bulbs and accept that we can't run down to Home Depot and get some new bulbs when they go out in our house?
- zaroth 4y ago
  If you want nice things that engineers spent thousands of hours researching, designing, and tuning, you can do the research to find those brands and pay extra for them. Most people don’t want to pay the premium and don’t value the benefits that come with that premium.
  - trgn 4y ago
    > Most people don’t want to pay the premium and don’t value the benefits that come with that premium. This is also called boiling the frog. People actually do care, but in the scheme of things, they'll accept it. The default lightbulb in the store 20 years ago had a tender warm light. The default lightbulb in the store today has garish light, or doesn't dim, or has that ugly plastic half cover. A real decline in quality of life. but sure, we can be dismissive about it, of course you can spend hours on the internet figuring it out (ignoring the fact that it took no effort whatsoever to get nice lighting before).
  - kleer001 4y ago
    Reddit's /r/buyitforlife 's 1.4 million subscribers and probably 10x as many people that visit without joining reddit and the subsequent similar population of people scraping that data and consuming the scraped data... I think they would disagree with you. That said, even if that's generously 100 million people that's a drop in the bucket compared to the rest of the population of consumers that couldn't care less.
  - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
    > 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 twll apart which item is qualify. The market is failing.
beebeepka 4y ago
> White LEDs are optimized for full, smooth spectrums. I thought full spectrum LEDs are future tech because I haven't seen one.
samsolomon 4y ago
Just chiming in to say that I'm a big fan of Waveform bulbs. That's what I've been buying for the last two years.
ChadMoran 4y ago
I've been looking for solid high CRI LED bulbs, thank you. Lately I've been using the GE Reveal/Relax. They were better than the contractor grade bulbs that came with the house but still just... wasn't there. If you know any other manufacturers like this I'd greatly appreciate it if you could provide their links.
- CrimsonCape 4y ago
  Budgetlightforum.com is the best source for flashlights and bulbs. Everyone there knows the metrics of what makes good light. GE Filled With Sun, Philips Ultra HD (available on Amazon, but from Canada), and some other Chinese brands are currently top of the chart for CRI 95+, RA 90+ bulbs
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - m463 4y ago
    Budgetlightforum.com This is a rabbit hole of lighting tech. I read the site and ... Now all my flashlights MUST run open source firmware. Buy a flashlight with the Anduril UI and you will understand. (search on amazon) With my flashlights: - press and hold the power button to ramp up brightness from zero - press and hold again to ram down brightness - click twice to get the maximum brightness from the light (mostly) there are lots of other modes available, designed to be harder to stumble into, plus customizations you can add. Also, the good flashlights have an always-on dim green LED that lets you find the flashlight during a power outage.
  - MengerSponge 4y ago
    I use GE Sun Filled bulbs at my desk. They're nice! I really wish I could easily get the Lumitronix or LEDvance models. http://www.seoulsemicon.com/en/technology/sunlike/casestudy/ http://www.seoulsemicon.com/en/technology/sunlike/casestudy/
hdjjhhvvhga 4y ago
As a side point, the bulbs from the link you shared might be of good quality but very, very low power by my standards. In order to work comfortably I need "200W replacements", not 40W-60W. This has enormous influence on my mood in winter months, probably people in warmer climates care less.
- vitaflo 4y ago
  They also sell 100w equivalents (1600 lumens) in an A12 form factor, FWIW.
NelsonMinar 4y ago
One thing the NYMag article says is that CRI is not a very good measure of light quality. I'd love to read more about that on a technical level. edit I learned a bit from a marketing blog article; CRI measures reflection of 8 spot colors but it leaves out some important parts of the spectrum, particularly deep red. https://www.waveformlighting.com/tech/what-is-cri-color-rendering-index https://www.waveformlighting.com/tech/what-is-cri-color-rend...
- nebula8804 4y ago
  In my experience, Halogen seems to come closest to the warm calm of natural sunlight. Seems like this article helps to confirm that. Been trying to find the best halogen in an A19 bulb form factor so I can deploy them all around my house. So far I have come up short and the best I can find is Halogen floodlight which is just not the same. Maybe I should just give up and install a bunch of these "sun tunnels" in my house. [1]:https://www.veluxusa.com/products/sun-tunnels https://www.veluxusa.com/products/sun-tunnels
jahewson 4y ago
> The issue is that 95% of consumers will only choose the cheap bulbs, period. The hardware stores near me, both big and small, stock only a single brand of bulb, as if they have some kind of exclusive deal.
- snickerbockers 4y ago
  This is why i do most of my shopping online. its not about price or laziness, but about selection. retail stores usually only stock the worst brands of anything.
nathan_jr 4y ago
Any ideas why waveform doesn’t offer recessed lighting products? Is that a particular form factor that is difficult to support high quality output?
michael1999 4y ago
That's not entirely true. I guarantee that someone at Philips is tuning their drivers not just on manufacturing cost, but also to "optimize" lifetime. That you can pay a premium for less "optimized" drivers is as much about market segmentation as it is about BOM costs. As evidence, notice that Philips refuses to sell the Dubai lamp outside Dubai. They are designed for truly long lifetimes, and nobody at Philips want's that.
- michael1999 4y ago
  In SaaS this is considered normal. At least 15% of systems cost is the complexity of having different tiers of service, and selectively turning them on and off, and making sure the system is still coherent when intentionally crippled. These are real engineering expenses to make the product deliberately less functional. What fraction of Microsoft Windows engineering goes into the complexity of picking and combining the feature sets of Windows Starter, Home Basic, Home Premium, Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate? It isn't 0. Engineering that is negative for user-value is routine in big business. It's a big part of what MBAs are for. It is such a counter-intuitive thing to do that it requires special training.
djmips 4y ago
> You can go buy high CRI, high quality bulbs right now. Nothing is stopping you. $200 Canadian (including shipping) for 6 bulbs is stopping me. $33 / bulb with no guarantee how long they will last.
jsmith45 4y ago
I really wish i could find a brand that would reliably tick all the boxes: - Does not overdrive the LEDs and Does not run power supply components at the limit of what they can. (Thus good longevity) - Has a current based driver, so that slight voltage shifts from an appliance kicking on don't result in an obvious brightness shift. - Suitable for use in recessed lighting or enclosed fixtures. (For better or worse, can lights and enclosed fixtures are still relatively common.) - Makes bulbs in most common shapes like A19, chandelier, and PAR/BR shapes (for recessed lighting fixtures) - Dimmable (And yes, I am quite well aware that being in conjunction with a current source driver is more complicated, but it is still possible). I'm not even particularly big on dimming, but I am big on smart switches, and many of those include dimming capabilities, and I don't want to worry about which bulbs I put where. - Good color rendering index (and other similar features) Even the linked companies products don't meet the full list. Their only dimmable A-series bulbs are the filament bulbs, which are not suitable for all use cases. Similarly, non of the non-filament bulbs in the A series shapes are marked as suitable for use in an enclosure.
- cesaref 4y ago
  Not sure where you are located, but if you have ceiling halogens to replace, there are two options - to use a low voltage bulb + separate PSU or the 'all in one' bulbs. Here in the UK they are designated GU10 for mains voltage and MR16 for 12v. If you go with 12v bulbs, you can invest in a decent power supply for them, and hence also avoid the poor quality bulb problem. It's possible to get power supplies to support multiple bulbs daisy chained, so you can invest in one decent power supply. For general bulbs (e.g. chandelier tulip bulbs) i've found it to be really hard to find stuff that works reliably. 'Normal' round bulbs seem to be more reliable for some reason.
- ikekkdcjkfke 4y ago
  I think ikea has some nice bulbs. Almost no flicker on slo mo camera. Their rechargeable batteries however are bad
  - mixmastamyk 4y ago
    Their bulbs and batteries work great here.
mschuster91 4y ago
> The issue is that 95% of consumers will only choose the cheap bulbs, period. Because the big box stores (Walmart, Home Depot or whatever) don't carry expensive stuff with Cree LEDs and solid cooling designs. They carry whatever shit they can get their hands on for as cheap as possible. And most consumers don't know better, the 1% of consumers that does know orders from Amazon and prays for not getting ripped off by counterfeiters.
- oezi 4y ago
  The primary issue is that the 'good' bulbs cost 4x but are only 30%-50% better. It is a clear ripoff.
unyttigfjelltol 4y ago
And it's fascinating that with LEDs you can ask for a specific wavelength of light ... and get it!
- Thrymr 4y ago
  I think you're confusing LEDs with lasers.
vl 4y ago
I use https://www.1000bulbs.com/ https://www.1000bulbs.com/ because they have godzillion bulbs in stock and it's possible to filter by CRI and color temperature. I just get highest CRI in required color temp, and it's good. More expensive, but well worth it.
- michaelmrose 4y ago
  As far as I can see this doesn't even show you the CRI just that its 90+ with limited reviews.
  - vl 4y ago
    Yeah, there is unfortunate need to click on each bulb and read through specs. Some of the bulbs have exact CRI listed, and some have "90+". I only buy the first kind.
TD-Linux 4y ago
Waveform Lighting bulbs have a great CRI and no camera visible flicker, but even they are overdriven/undercooled. I've already had one fail because of the PFC chip (I did an autopsy). They also don't have enough bulk capacitance to not flicker when other nasty loads are on the line. I did find these tables from Budget Light Forums handy for shopping, however the fact that you have to use these I think only reinforces the point of the article: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/12jj1A6PNjHmWbFNu0FSisEztir7izxAhqw3ebxPLCZA/edit https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/12jj1A6PNjHmWbFNu0FSi... https://optimizeyourbiology.com/light-bulb-database https://optimizeyourbiology.com/light-bulb-database
7speter 4y ago
95% of consumers are squeezed financially and can’t afford the nice bulbs.
seanp2k2 4y ago
The "VIVID" line by SORAA are also high-quality high-CRI LEDs with good cooling solutions, and they're available in things like MR16 GU10 for desk lamps with the "weird" bulbs with two little prongs. I got a cheap GU10 desk clamp lamp on Amazon and spent twice as much as the lamp itself (which came with a functional bulb) on the nicer bulb. The exact model was SM16GA-09-60D-930-03 if anyone is curious -- fabulous super-bright desk lamp that is very flood-y and covers a large area with a very small lamp head. But yeah, explaining to normal folks that they need $30-$60 lightbulbs for every fixture in their home is basically a non-starter, but for me, I use this lamp every day and it should last a decade or more, so the value prop isn't bad, especially compared to spending $500 or so on something like a Humanscale "nice" desk lamp, which technically has much worse CRI and much lower output. We recently built our home and went with WAC recessed lighting in all the main areas, which was about a $15k premium over just using what the contractor wanted to use, involved a lighting design company (that was also purchased the fixtures from), and took a dozen+ hours of our time and input, but I think it was worth it in the grand scheme of how much we spent. I personally can't stand hanging out at peoples houses where they have mismatched lights or just very poor lighting; it kills any interior design niceties and makes you really realize how much lighting affects the general feeling of indoor spaces.
dotancohen 4y ago
Here is one common vendor: $18 USD for a single 10 Watt bulb? I don't care how expensive electricity is, the $2 incandescent bulb is a better value.
kansface 4y ago
I believe I tried to buy from them when I lived in SF, but their bulbs were at that time (and possibly still today) illegal in the state of California! I don't remember which regulation it was, possibly one around efficiency or maybe they needed to undergo some test. I think they even had a lab somewhere on the peninsula, too... I was so angry at the state of California for forcing me to have shit quality lights that I gave thought to becoming an illegal bulb runner.
Forgeties79 4y ago
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.

causality0 4y ago

Is there anything decent in the middle? Somewhere between one dollar bulbs and eighteen dollar bulbs?

pkulak 4y ago
I've been happy with my Cree leds. I can't seem to find them online, only Home Depot.
- nevir 4y ago
  Home Depot has an exclusively agreement with em
jghn 4y ago
I used to buy Cree bulbs. But they they sold the brand and were changed to be the same mass market schlock as the other bulbs, except with a name brand that implies quality.

soulofmischief 4y ago

99% of white LEDs on the market arhave anything but full, smooth spectrums. Most of my lighting is from waveform lighting but you have to pay the premium for full spectrum, plus you have to shell out for expensive dimmers if you don't want flickering.

cratermoon 4y ago

You can, but as GP comment said, "Good indoor lighting is now something only people with plenty of disposable income can afford." When you're poor, are you going to cough up $18 for a single bulb, or get a 16-pack for $24 at Home Depot? $288 vs $24.

Dylan16807 4y ago
So "is now something" implies that incandescent was affordable. 16 incandescent bulbs, averaging 3 hours per day, would cost about 50 cents per day. $150-$250 per year in most of the country. So getting the really premium LEDs is still cheaper than lighting used to be. Even better if you use the good bulbs for room lighting and the cheap bulbs for closets and outdoors and such.
- cratermoon 4y ago
  This is not how poor people are able to manage money. When you're living paycheck-to-paycheck, you don't buy $18 bulbs, ever. That $18 is needed for rent, food, and utilities.
  - Dylan16807 4y ago
    > That $18 is needed for rent, food, and utilities. You say that like the utilities weren't even larger before the change. That $11-18 a month is explicitly not going to utilities. I'd say those people are getting an upgrade in food or other things at the cost of CRI. And they can choose not to take that trade if they prefer CRI. You only need to buy one bulb at a time, after all, no need for massive savings. And even if you buy the extra fancy $18 bulbs you'll still save some money compared to incandescent.

jghn 4y ago

The big problem for me is, as a consumer, how do I know that brand X is producing quality bulbs that'll last a long time? I'm very happy to pay more for that. How does one sift through marketing to get to actual quality? And then how do I know that they stick with the high quality approach? What happens when a brand decides to rest on the laurels of their brand name and start slipping in lower quality parts?

jchw 4y ago
Some bulbs will give you information on their CRI which ideally should be required to be labeled on the bulbs packaging the way calorie information is required on food packaging (but I don't think it is.) That will tell you roughly how good the quality of the light is by proxy of the spectrum of light it covers. On the other hand, there is no equivalent afaik for knowing how well the power supply is designed or how hard the LEDs are driven. I guess for that, the consumer can turn to the trusted source for this kind of information, bigclivedotcom. (Sarcasm; but seriously, this is a problem.)
- terr-dav 4y ago
  An important point in the article is that CRI for LED bulbs does not meaningfully map to the light quality. >Oh, but: Experts agree that the color-rendering index doesn’t really index how colors are rendered. Some bulbs with a 90 CRI make things look wan; some with an 80 are passable. There are better, more useful metrics, but you can’t have them. Nobody puts them on the packaging. One lighting professional — an LED advocate, no less — told me he sometimes calls up the manufacturer and asks to talk to an engineer to get the real specs.
  - jchw 4y ago
    Yes that's a good point, there's definitely more to it than just CRI. That said, a bulb with very poor CRI definitely sucks, so it's not entirely useless. This seems like one of those things that will suck until it doesn't.
  - mech987987 4y ago

browningstreet 4y ago

As consumers are we really supposed to do a ton of research on light bulbs and accept that we can't run down to Home Depot and get some new bulbs when they go out in our house?

zaroth 4y ago
If you want nice things that engineers spent thousands of hours researching, designing, and tuning, you can do the research to find those brands and pay extra for them. Most people don’t want to pay the premium and don’t value the benefits that come with that premium.
- trgn 4y ago
  > Most people don’t want to pay the premium and don’t value the benefits that come with that premium. This is also called boiling the frog. People actually do care, but in the scheme of things, they'll accept it. The default lightbulb in the store 20 years ago had a tender warm light. The default lightbulb in the store today has garish light, or doesn't dim, or has that ugly plastic half cover. A real decline in quality of life. but sure, we can be dismissive about it, of course you can spend hours on the internet figuring it out (ignoring the fact that it took no effort whatsoever to get nice lighting before).
- kleer001 4y ago
  Reddit's /r/buyitforlife 's 1.4 million subscribers and probably 10x as many people that visit without joining reddit and the subsequent similar population of people scraping that data and consuming the scraped data... I think they would disagree with you. That said, even if that's generously 100 million people that's a drop in the bucket compared to the rest of the population of consumers that couldn't care less.
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  > 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 twll apart which item is qualify. The market is failing.

beebeepka 4y ago

> White LEDs are optimized for full, smooth spectrums. I thought full spectrum LEDs are future tech because I haven't seen one.

samsolomon 4y ago

Just chiming in to say that I'm a big fan of Waveform bulbs. That's what I've been buying for the last two years.

ChadMoran 4y ago

I've been looking for solid high CRI LED bulbs, thank you. Lately I've been using the GE Reveal/Relax. They were better than the contractor grade bulbs that came with the house but still just... wasn't there. If you know any other manufacturers like this I'd greatly appreciate it if you could provide their links.

CrimsonCape 4y ago
Budgetlightforum.com is the best source for flashlights and bulbs. Everyone there knows the metrics of what makes good light. GE Filled With Sun, Philips Ultra HD (available on Amazon, but from Canada), and some other Chinese brands are currently top of the chart for CRI 95+, RA 90+ bulbs
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- m463 4y ago
  Budgetlightforum.com This is a rabbit hole of lighting tech. I read the site and ... Now all my flashlights MUST run open source firmware. Buy a flashlight with the Anduril UI and you will understand. (search on amazon) With my flashlights: - press and hold the power button to ramp up brightness from zero - press and hold again to ram down brightness - click twice to get the maximum brightness from the light (mostly) there are lots of other modes available, designed to be harder to stumble into, plus customizations you can add. Also, the good flashlights have an always-on dim green LED that lets you find the flashlight during a power outage.
- MengerSponge 4y ago
  I use GE Sun Filled bulbs at my desk. They're nice! I really wish I could easily get the Lumitronix or LEDvance models. http://www.seoulsemicon.com/en/technology/sunlike/casestudy/ http://www.seoulsemicon.com/en/technology/sunlike/casestudy/

hdjjhhvvhga 4y ago

As a side point, the bulbs from the link you shared might be of good quality but very, very low power by my standards. In order to work comfortably I need "200W replacements", not 40W-60W. This has enormous influence on my mood in winter months, probably people in warmer climates care less.

vitaflo 4y ago
They also sell 100w equivalents (1600 lumens) in an A12 form factor, FWIW.

NelsonMinar 4y ago

One thing the NYMag article says is that CRI is not a very good measure of light quality. I'd love to read more about that on a technical level. edit I learned a bit from a marketing blog article; CRI measures reflection of 8 spot colors but it leaves out some important parts of the spectrum, particularly deep red. https://www.waveformlighting.com/tech/what-is-cri-color-rendering-index https://www.waveformlighting.com/tech/what-is-cri-color-rend...

nebula8804 4y ago
In my experience, Halogen seems to come closest to the warm calm of natural sunlight. Seems like this article helps to confirm that. Been trying to find the best halogen in an A19 bulb form factor so I can deploy them all around my house. So far I have come up short and the best I can find is Halogen floodlight which is just not the same. Maybe I should just give up and install a bunch of these "sun tunnels" in my house. [1]:https://www.veluxusa.com/products/sun-tunnels https://www.veluxusa.com/products/sun-tunnels

jahewson 4y ago

> The issue is that 95% of consumers will only choose the cheap bulbs, period. The hardware stores near me, both big and small, stock only a single brand of bulb, as if they have some kind of exclusive deal.

snickerbockers 4y ago
This is why i do most of my shopping online. its not about price or laziness, but about selection. retail stores usually only stock the worst brands of anything.

nathan_jr 4y ago

Any ideas why waveform doesn’t offer recessed lighting products? Is that a particular form factor that is difficult to support high quality output?

michael1999 4y ago

That's not entirely true. I guarantee that someone at Philips is tuning their drivers not just on manufacturing cost, but also to "optimize" lifetime. That you can pay a premium for less "optimized" drivers is as much about market segmentation as it is about BOM costs. As evidence, notice that Philips refuses to sell the Dubai lamp outside Dubai. They are designed for truly long lifetimes, and nobody at Philips want's that.

michael1999 4y ago
In SaaS this is considered normal. At least 15% of systems cost is the complexity of having different tiers of service, and selectively turning them on and off, and making sure the system is still coherent when intentionally crippled. These are real engineering expenses to make the product deliberately less functional. What fraction of Microsoft Windows engineering goes into the complexity of picking and combining the feature sets of Windows Starter, Home Basic, Home Premium, Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate? It isn't 0. Engineering that is negative for user-value is routine in big business. It's a big part of what MBAs are for. It is such a counter-intuitive thing to do that it requires special training.

djmips 4y ago

> You can go buy high CRI, high quality bulbs right now. Nothing is stopping you. $200 Canadian (including shipping) for 6 bulbs is stopping me. $33 / bulb with no guarantee how long they will last.

jsmith45 4y ago

I really wish i could find a brand that would reliably tick all the boxes: - Does not overdrive the LEDs and Does not run power supply components at the limit of what they can. (Thus good longevity) - Has a current based driver, so that slight voltage shifts from an appliance kicking on don't result in an obvious brightness shift. - Suitable for use in recessed lighting or enclosed fixtures. (For better or worse, can lights and enclosed fixtures are still relatively common.) - Makes bulbs in most common shapes like A19, chandelier, and PAR/BR shapes (for recessed lighting fixtures) - Dimmable (And yes, I am quite well aware that being in conjunction with a current source driver is more complicated, but it is still possible). I'm not even particularly big on dimming, but I am big on smart switches, and many of those include dimming capabilities, and I don't want to worry about which bulbs I put where. - Good color rendering index (and other similar features) Even the linked companies products don't meet the full list. Their only dimmable A-series bulbs are the filament bulbs, which are not suitable for all use cases. Similarly, non of the non-filament bulbs in the A series shapes are marked as suitable for use in an enclosure.

cesaref 4y ago
Not sure where you are located, but if you have ceiling halogens to replace, there are two options - to use a low voltage bulb + separate PSU or the 'all in one' bulbs. Here in the UK they are designated GU10 for mains voltage and MR16 for 12v. If you go with 12v bulbs, you can invest in a decent power supply for them, and hence also avoid the poor quality bulb problem. It's possible to get power supplies to support multiple bulbs daisy chained, so you can invest in one decent power supply. For general bulbs (e.g. chandelier tulip bulbs) i've found it to be really hard to find stuff that works reliably. 'Normal' round bulbs seem to be more reliable for some reason.
ikekkdcjkfke 4y ago
I think ikea has some nice bulbs. Almost no flicker on slo mo camera. Their rechargeable batteries however are bad
- mixmastamyk 4y ago
  Their bulbs and batteries work great here.

mschuster91 4y ago

> The issue is that 95% of consumers will only choose the cheap bulbs, period. Because the big box stores (Walmart, Home Depot or whatever) don't carry expensive stuff with Cree LEDs and solid cooling designs. They carry whatever shit they can get their hands on for as cheap as possible. And most consumers don't know better, the 1% of consumers that does know orders from Amazon and prays for not getting ripped off by counterfeiters.

oezi 4y ago
The primary issue is that the 'good' bulbs cost 4x but are only 30%-50% better. It is a clear ripoff.

unyttigfjelltol 4y ago

And it's fascinating that with LEDs you can ask for a specific wavelength of light ... and get it!

Thrymr 4y ago
I think you're confusing LEDs with lasers.

vl 4y ago

I use https://www.1000bulbs.com/ https://www.1000bulbs.com/ because they have godzillion bulbs in stock and it's possible to filter by CRI and color temperature. I just get highest CRI in required color temp, and it's good. More expensive, but well worth it.

michaelmrose 4y ago
As far as I can see this doesn't even show you the CRI just that its 90+ with limited reviews.
- vl 4y ago
  Yeah, there is unfortunate need to click on each bulb and read through specs. Some of the bulbs have exact CRI listed, and some have "90+". I only buy the first kind.

TD-Linux 4y ago

Waveform Lighting bulbs have a great CRI and no camera visible flicker, but even they are overdriven/undercooled. I've already had one fail because of the PFC chip (I did an autopsy). They also don't have enough bulk capacitance to not flicker when other nasty loads are on the line. I did find these tables from Budget Light Forums handy for shopping, however the fact that you have to use these I think only reinforces the point of the article: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/12jj1A6PNjHmWbFNu0FSisEztir7izxAhqw3ebxPLCZA/edit https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/12jj1A6PNjHmWbFNu0FSi... https://optimizeyourbiology.com/light-bulb-database https://optimizeyourbiology.com/light-bulb-database

7speter 4y ago

95% of consumers are squeezed financially and can’t afford the nice bulbs.

seanp2k2 4y ago

The "VIVID" line by SORAA are also high-quality high-CRI LEDs with good cooling solutions, and they're available in things like MR16 GU10 for desk lamps with the "weird" bulbs with two little prongs. I got a cheap GU10 desk clamp lamp on Amazon and spent twice as much as the lamp itself (which came with a functional bulb) on the nicer bulb. The exact model was SM16GA-09-60D-930-03 if anyone is curious -- fabulous super-bright desk lamp that is very flood-y and covers a large area with a very small lamp head. But yeah, explaining to normal folks that they need $30-$60 lightbulbs for every fixture in their home is basically a non-starter, but for me, I use this lamp every day and it should last a decade or more, so the value prop isn't bad, especially compared to spending $500 or so on something like a Humanscale "nice" desk lamp, which technically has much worse CRI and much lower output. We recently built our home and went with WAC recessed lighting in all the main areas, which was about a $15k premium over just using what the contractor wanted to use, involved a lighting design company (that was also purchased the fixtures from), and took a dozen+ hours of our time and input, but I think it was worth it in the grand scheme of how much we spent. I personally can't stand hanging out at peoples houses where they have mismatched lights or just very poor lighting; it kills any interior design niceties and makes you really realize how much lighting affects the general feeling of indoor spaces.

dotancohen 4y ago

Here is one common vendor: $18 USD for a single 10 Watt bulb? I don't care how expensive electricity is, the $2 incandescent bulb is a better value.

kansface 4y ago

I believe I tried to buy from them when I lived in SF, but their bulbs were at that time (and possibly still today) illegal in the state of California! I don't remember which regulation it was, possibly one around efficiency or maybe they needed to undergo some test. I think they even had a lab somewhere on the peninsula, too... I was so angry at the state of California for forcing me to have shit quality lights that I gave thought to becoming an illegal bulb runner.

Forgeties79 4y ago

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.