5 ms·

In the history of LED lighting, it took quite a bit of work (hybrid phosphor technology, etc) to get them to emit warm color temperatures. The exact color temp

In the history of LED lighting, it took quite a bit of work (hybrid phosphor technology, etc) to get them to emit warm color temperatures. The exact color temp can be a personal preference, but I think a lot of people aren't privy to the difference the color temperature of "white" light can make! I want to go on a guerrilla campaign around my neighborhood and replace porch light bulbs with warm equivalents.

amarcheschi 2y ago
Along light temperature there's light cri as well, which measures how faithful to real life a light is. New standards such as Tm30 came out recently as well
- esafak 2y ago
  It's hard enough to get the CRI out of manufacturers. I've never seen any other measure of light quality reporter ever.
  - davidmurdoch 2y ago
    Waveform lighting publishes their reports.
- gsck 2y ago
  CRI is usually only reported on professional grade lamps (Theatre, Film/TV) you'll almost never find it reported on anything below that.
  - Auracle 2y ago
    Some consumer bulbs at least used to have it listed on their packaging.
Karrot_Kream 2y ago
In general I think the population at large, and especially programmer types, know way too little about lighting given how ubiquitous both lighting and photography/videography is in our everyday life. Good on you for fighting the warm light fight!
- Der_Einzige 2y ago
  They claim to know a lot but then none of them build proper Cf Lumen or F.Lux style tooling (i.e. super easy default instead of requiring tons of setup) for turning ALL blue light off (red shifting) IN THE DEFAULT OS as the primary way to use your device at night. None of that wussy shifting the color temperature brown shit that doesn't meaningfully reduce blue light hazard. I can literally preserve my whole night vision and have zero eye strain in pitch black conditions by red shifting my computer screen. No one supports this because we are stupid. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_effects_of_high-energy_visible_light https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_effects_of_high-ene... The laser pointer community of all groups understands this stuff well. They recommend green lasers because they use the lowest power for the highest visibility at night. Blue lasers are easy to get super powerful, but unlike a lower powered green one, which usually will only temporarily blind you if you make a mistake - a powerful blue laser will straight up destroy your eyes forever. Permanent blindness.
  - Karrot_Kream 2y ago
    > The laser pointer community of all groups understands this stuff well This has been my major frustration also. Different enthusiast communities all discover these things independently and talk about them in their own domain language. Night photography and astral photography talks about red shifting as well.
  - c0balt 2y ago
    > They claim to know a lot but then none of them build proper Cf Lumen or F.Lux style tooling (i.e. super easy default instead of requiring tons of setup) for turning ALL blue light off (red shifting) IN THE DEFAULT OS as the primary way to use your device at night. Probably not what you are aiming for but for Linux this is a somewhat solved problems. The default DM, Gnome, has built-in color shift with a time schedule AFAIK. For Wayland and xorg there are also numerous other solutions that do a display-level redshift, I can recommend wl-sunset for Wayland.
    - scns 2y ago
wyager 2y ago
While the color temperature situation has improved, the actual spectral quality of most consumer LED lighting still leaves a lot to be desired. CRI makes an effort to measure this, although it's a low-granularity measurement. I personally buy surplus cinema lighting equipment and use it to light my house. I have a bunch of fancy cinematic LEDs with high CRIs that produce decent light, although they still can't fully compete with tungsten bulbs (e.g. Arrilite series) Ideally you want to be looking for something with a color temperature in the 3500K (mid-morning) to 6500K (clear blue noon day) range and a CRI of 95+. Also bug manufacturers to start using better color quality metrics like TM-30.
- wonger_ 2y ago
  Where do you buy the surplus cinema lighting equipment? And how do you mount it inside your house? I went down a high CRI office lighting rabbit hole last year and I could only find expensive, new photography lights.
  - nicoburns 2y ago
    These guys do very high quality lighting aimed at homes and offices: https://www.waveformlighting.com/ https://www.waveformlighting.com/
  - namibj 2y ago
    Just get modules or strip from Yuju; I have zero bad experience over many years with them. Sure, it's not cheap, but IMO ~1$/W plus simple PSU (either some standard voltage, or dimmable current, depending on what you got) for good and 1.5~2$/W for very good CRI is quite fine.
    - Xcelerate 2y ago
      Yep. I’ve been replacing all the bulbs in my house with Yuji SunWave, and the difference is astonishing. I just put in four of their PAR30 4000K bulbs above my kitchen island, and the first time I turned the lights on at night I gasped at how much it looked like sunlight. (Then again, my wife said she couldn’t tell much of a difference and suggested my reaction was possibly confirmation bias, so YMMV.) They’re quite expensive compared to normal LED bulbs, but it’s hard to argue against the quality of life improvement, particularly in the winter where I work remotely from a home office all day. I was actually considering setting up an high brightness array of their full spectrum lighting above my desk. I know the article mentions diffuse lighting is best, but for some odd reason I prefer “spotlight” style. I don’t know why—it just feels cozier to me. One thing I’ve noticed as I’ve learned more about lighting is that the brighter the light, the better cool color temperatures start to look. For a long time I hated anything above 3000K (too “office-like”) but 4000K actually starts looking pretty good around ~7,000 lumens directly overhead, and I imagine 5000K would look alright above 15,000 lumens or so (perceived brightness is a logarithmic function of luminance). IMO 5000K looks downright ghastly in a home setting for the typical range of 500-800 lumens that most bulbs sell at nowadays.
gehwartzen 2y ago
I just went through this with my car. All the OEM overhead interior lights were horrible 6000k+ type bulbs that not only made the interior feel like a hospital room but completely ruined my night vision turning me into the classic “Jesus!! You’re going to kill someone!” dad whenever my kids would fiddle with them at night. I cannot overstate how much of a difference it made switching them all to 3000k warm whites. Of course instead of being replaceable bulbs they were all SMDs directly soldered onto little PCBs making it a bit of a project … but so worth it!
- walterbell 2y ago
  Well done! How did you figure out 3000K replacement part numbers for each SMD?
  - gehwartzen 2y ago
    I happened to find someone on a German forum (cars a VW) that had taken his overheads apart to do the same thing who posted a p/n or rather an industry size. I had never dealt with replacing SMD LEDs before but it seems there is an industry standard sizing that most adhere to. Just ordered a few in that size from Amazon and they worked. From what I remember most in that size were rated for similar voltages so seemed pretty universal. I imagine as long as you can see the led and measure its dimensions finding a replacement should be easy. Desoldering/soldering was a pain as they were tiny; like 2mmx2mm. One cool thing I learned though is that you can use a multimeter in its ‘continuity’ setting to provide enough current to light up these small LEDs which is very convenient when testing if you soldered them correctly. https://www.zgsm-china.com/blog/something-you-should-know-about-leds.html https://www.zgsm-china.com/blog/something-you-should-know-ab... https://www.reddit.com/r/Tiguan/comments/1hq2hae/changed_overhead_light_to_a_warm_white_3000k_led/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Tiguan/comments/1hq2hae/changed_ove...
    - pkolaczk 2y ago
      Desoldering / resoldering is not pain if you have proper tools to do it and know the correct technique. Trying to do it with an iron is making things very hard or even impossible (especially for smds with contacts below not at the sides). Using hot air rework station + preheater and low melt solder paste is the way to go - and it’s a piece of cake then. And you can do the whole board at once in a few minutes. I modded most LEDs in my house because 2700-3000K is too warm for me, but 4000K is too cool. So I mix them ;)
RHSeeger 2y ago
> I think a lot of people aren't privy to the difference the color temperature of "white" light can make Go out and buy cheap Christmas lights and expensive ones, and put them up next to each there, and show them that. The difference is staggering. To the point where they look dumb if you hang them up together.

amarcheschi 2y ago

Along light temperature there's light cri as well, which measures how faithful to real life a light is. New standards such as Tm30 came out recently as well

esafak 2y ago
It's hard enough to get the CRI out of manufacturers. I've never seen any other measure of light quality reporter ever.
- davidmurdoch 2y ago
  Waveform lighting publishes their reports.
gsck 2y ago
CRI is usually only reported on professional grade lamps (Theatre, Film/TV) you'll almost never find it reported on anything below that.
- Auracle 2y ago
  Some consumer bulbs at least used to have it listed on their packaging.

Karrot_Kream 2y ago

In general I think the population at large, and especially programmer types, know way too little about lighting given how ubiquitous both lighting and photography/videography is in our everyday life. Good on you for fighting the warm light fight!

Der_Einzige 2y ago
They claim to know a lot but then none of them build proper Cf Lumen or F.Lux style tooling (i.e. super easy default instead of requiring tons of setup) for turning ALL blue light off (red shifting) IN THE DEFAULT OS as the primary way to use your device at night. None of that wussy shifting the color temperature brown shit that doesn't meaningfully reduce blue light hazard. I can literally preserve my whole night vision and have zero eye strain in pitch black conditions by red shifting my computer screen. No one supports this because we are stupid. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_effects_of_high-energy_visible_light https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_effects_of_high-ene... The laser pointer community of all groups understands this stuff well. They recommend green lasers because they use the lowest power for the highest visibility at night. Blue lasers are easy to get super powerful, but unlike a lower powered green one, which usually will only temporarily blind you if you make a mistake - a powerful blue laser will straight up destroy your eyes forever. Permanent blindness.
- Karrot_Kream 2y ago
  > The laser pointer community of all groups understands this stuff well This has been my major frustration also. Different enthusiast communities all discover these things independently and talk about them in their own domain language. Night photography and astral photography talks about red shifting as well.
- c0balt 2y ago
  > They claim to know a lot but then none of them build proper Cf Lumen or F.Lux style tooling (i.e. super easy default instead of requiring tons of setup) for turning ALL blue light off (red shifting) IN THE DEFAULT OS as the primary way to use your device at night. Probably not what you are aiming for but for Linux this is a somewhat solved problems. The default DM, Gnome, has built-in color shift with a time schedule AFAIK. For Wayland and xorg there are also numerous other solutions that do a display-level redshift, I can recommend wl-sunset for Wayland.
  - scns 2y ago

wyager 2y ago

While the color temperature situation has improved, the actual spectral quality of most consumer LED lighting still leaves a lot to be desired. CRI makes an effort to measure this, although it's a low-granularity measurement. I personally buy surplus cinema lighting equipment and use it to light my house. I have a bunch of fancy cinematic LEDs with high CRIs that produce decent light, although they still can't fully compete with tungsten bulbs (e.g. Arrilite series) Ideally you want to be looking for something with a color temperature in the 3500K (mid-morning) to 6500K (clear blue noon day) range and a CRI of 95+. Also bug manufacturers to start using better color quality metrics like TM-30.

wonger_ 2y ago
Where do you buy the surplus cinema lighting equipment? And how do you mount it inside your house? I went down a high CRI office lighting rabbit hole last year and I could only find expensive, new photography lights.
- nicoburns 2y ago
  These guys do very high quality lighting aimed at homes and offices: https://www.waveformlighting.com/ https://www.waveformlighting.com/
- namibj 2y ago
  Just get modules or strip from Yuju; I have zero bad experience over many years with them. Sure, it's not cheap, but IMO ~1$/W plus simple PSU (either some standard voltage, or dimmable current, depending on what you got) for good and 1.5~2$/W for very good CRI is quite fine.
  - Xcelerate 2y ago
    Yep. I’ve been replacing all the bulbs in my house with Yuji SunWave, and the difference is astonishing. I just put in four of their PAR30 4000K bulbs above my kitchen island, and the first time I turned the lights on at night I gasped at how much it looked like sunlight. (Then again, my wife said she couldn’t tell much of a difference and suggested my reaction was possibly confirmation bias, so YMMV.) They’re quite expensive compared to normal LED bulbs, but it’s hard to argue against the quality of life improvement, particularly in the winter where I work remotely from a home office all day. I was actually considering setting up an high brightness array of their full spectrum lighting above my desk. I know the article mentions diffuse lighting is best, but for some odd reason I prefer “spotlight” style. I don’t know why—it just feels cozier to me. One thing I’ve noticed as I’ve learned more about lighting is that the brighter the light, the better cool color temperatures start to look. For a long time I hated anything above 3000K (too “office-like”) but 4000K actually starts looking pretty good around ~7,000 lumens directly overhead, and I imagine 5000K would look alright above 15,000 lumens or so (perceived brightness is a logarithmic function of luminance). IMO 5000K looks downright ghastly in a home setting for the typical range of 500-800 lumens that most bulbs sell at nowadays.

gehwartzen 2y ago

I just went through this with my car. All the OEM overhead interior lights were horrible 6000k+ type bulbs that not only made the interior feel like a hospital room but completely ruined my night vision turning me into the classic “Jesus!! You’re going to kill someone!” dad whenever my kids would fiddle with them at night. I cannot overstate how much of a difference it made switching them all to 3000k warm whites. Of course instead of being replaceable bulbs they were all SMDs directly soldered onto little PCBs making it a bit of a project … but so worth it!

walterbell 2y ago
Well done! How did you figure out 3000K replacement part numbers for each SMD?
- gehwartzen 2y ago
  I happened to find someone on a German forum (cars a VW) that had taken his overheads apart to do the same thing who posted a p/n or rather an industry size. I had never dealt with replacing SMD LEDs before but it seems there is an industry standard sizing that most adhere to. Just ordered a few in that size from Amazon and they worked. From what I remember most in that size were rated for similar voltages so seemed pretty universal. I imagine as long as you can see the led and measure its dimensions finding a replacement should be easy. Desoldering/soldering was a pain as they were tiny; like 2mmx2mm. One cool thing I learned though is that you can use a multimeter in its ‘continuity’ setting to provide enough current to light up these small LEDs which is very convenient when testing if you soldered them correctly. https://www.zgsm-china.com/blog/something-you-should-know-about-leds.html https://www.zgsm-china.com/blog/something-you-should-know-ab... https://www.reddit.com/r/Tiguan/comments/1hq2hae/changed_overhead_light_to_a_warm_white_3000k_led/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Tiguan/comments/1hq2hae/changed_ove...
  - pkolaczk 2y ago
    Desoldering / resoldering is not pain if you have proper tools to do it and know the correct technique. Trying to do it with an iron is making things very hard or even impossible (especially for smds with contacts below not at the sides). Using hot air rework station + preheater and low melt solder paste is the way to go - and it’s a piece of cake then. And you can do the whole board at once in a few minutes. I modded most LEDs in my house because 2700-3000K is too warm for me, but 4000K is too cool. So I mix them ;)

RHSeeger 2y ago

> I think a lot of people aren't privy to the difference the color temperature of "white" light can make Go out and buy cheap Christmas lights and expensive ones, and put them up next to each there, and show them that. The difference is staggering. To the point where they look dumb if you hang them up together.