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.
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?
One guy bought over 4 thousands LED lamps over years, meticulously measured their actual specs and made a huge online catalog https://lamptest.ru/
I follow his project a bit and it looks like consumers are really at loss. Generally there is no reliable way to choose a good led lamp without consulting such catalog. Lamps packaging often lies about actual specs, lamps with the same packaging but manufactured in different years might have different quality etc
Great site. I wish he had an English translation. But I forgive him. This is what the Internet should be! Individual people who do one thing really well. So happy to see that this still exists online.
Guess what. Lamptest guy from my comment above tests batteries as well. Here are his websites for this project (same data but different design):
https://battest.ru/https://batterytest.ru/
That would be the benevolent Engelbart version of AI, wouldn’t it?
Instead of dumb capitalism, clickbait and silly content marketing driving human activity, to have an AI that saves us from wasting our time figuring out the answer to questions that have been answered long before. And then, instead, points us to those questions that have not yet been asked, much less answered. What experiments have not yet been done.
After all, no GPT-4, no matter how many billions of parameters, could tell you what the best battery is in the world if it wasn’t for that one human dude in his garage in Denmark, or Latvia, or wherever, who actually tested them all.
There have been attempts to reboot webrings for indie site discovery. With AI harvesting and monetizing indie sites, there is some risk of future content being gated by pay/auth/bot walls. Another approach could be private overlay P2P VPNs where participants are invited/vetted by the social contract of a small community.
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?
The issue is that LED bulbs aren’t simple devices like incandescent bulbs. LED bulbs have an electronic power supply inside which drives the LEDs at a constant current.
Power supply design is a major subfield of electronics engineering and there are all kinds of tradeoffs you can make to optimize for different goals. Consumer electronics almost always optimizes for cost, to the detriment of all else.
It is possible (and not very difficult) to design LED bulbs that will practically outlive their owners [1]. The problem is that it requires putting more LEDs in the bulb and driving them at lower current. This makes the bulb cost more and the only benefit is longer life. For a manufacturer, there are nothing but downsides to this approach.
>It is possible (and not very difficult) to design LED bulbs that will practically outlive their owners
It is also possible (and not very difficult) to design incandescent bulbs that will outlive their owners. In fact, the first mass produced light bulbs generally lasted 2,500+ hours. In the 1920s, the major bulb manufacturers formed the 'Pheobus Cartel' in Geneva and secretly colluded to limit the lifespan of bulbs to 1,000 hours to boost sales [1]. Another example of planned obsolescence harming consumers and the environment.
> On 23 December 1924, a group of leading international businessmen gathered in Geneva for a meeting that would alter the world for decades to come. Present were top representatives from all the major lightbulb manufacturers, including Germany’s Osram, the Netherlands’ Philips, France’s Compagnie des Lampes, and the United States’ General Electric. As revelers hung Christmas lights elsewhere in the city, the group founded the Phoebus cartel, a supervisory body that would carve up the worldwide incandescent lightbulb market, with each national and regional zone assigned its own manufacturers and production quotas. It was the first cartel in history to enjoy a truly global reach.
An also should add that color temperature on incandescent lamps play a role on its lifespan, want long lasting lamps? Lower the current (or increase the resistance).
incandescent light bulbs efficiency increases with their temperature/current. At low enough current they will last long enough but waste a lot energy as well.
You can dim them, and provide a slow start to prevent the inrush current (which is like 10times more than nominal with tungsten resistance increasing due so high 2500K temps).
Thankfully, LED lighting will probably be gone within 20 years, while incandescent will be coming back more efficient than LED could dream. Already bumping up against theoretical maximum efficiency, LED lighting can't get any more efficient, and the better LED is at color rendition, the less efficient it is. But there are vast amounts of improvement available for incandescent lighting, and a group at MIT has already created incandescent light that is twice as efficient as LED.[1]
> Exciting, but that article is from 2016 and here we are in 2023 with no commercial availability.
That is a fantastic point. If they can't revolutionizing lighting in 7 years, it will never happen. Oh, btw, LED was invented in 1962, but it only took about half a century for the commercial viability of high powered LED lighting to appear and begin to take over the lighting market in 2011.
The concept is interesting, and reading the article reversed my initial response to treat this as a crank concept.
That said ...
... LEDs involve finding materials which exhibit specific quantum behaviours which correspond to human visual acuity.
Photonic bulbs involve the much simpler blackbody radiation concepts of not only incandescent light bulbs but hundreds to thousands of millennia of previous experience with combustion-based lighting ... and, yes, the added twist of finding viable IR-reflective / visual-spectrum emissive materials.
The second problem seems more reasonably simpler. One would hope that progress might be occuring at a more rapid rate.
(There's a similar argument I've used to contrast nuclear fission, which was commercially exploited within two decades of first demonstration, and nuclear fusion, which coming on a century from its theoretical understanding remains not even experimentally demonstrable on a continuous, energy-positive basis, let alone in commercial application. Some problems are just hard.
Yes, there are thresholds and breakthroughs, and they do occur. But given a few decades of lived experience matching advertisement to delivery, as well as a stronger awareness of historical examples and trends, patterns do become evident.
And that said: I will keep an eye on this. It does have the advantages of being simple, based on very well-proved technology, and a reasonable extension of same.
Most of the capital invested in incandescent technology was related to the Phoebus cartel. The pressure to make incandescent efficient was just never there until very recently. LED has severe problems, some solvable, some not. The article mentions flicker, but really should have specified. Nearly all LED drivers employ PWM. There are constant current LED drivers, and they are more efficient than PWM drivers, but PWM drivers are cheaper to design and manufacture. While many will claim PWM doesn't bother them because they can't detect it, they're not only exhibiting callousness for those that are bothered and harmed by PWM, they're falling into a fallacious trap, i.e. what they don't know and can't detect can't harm them, which is patently false, and one counter example is carbon monoxide. PWM LED drivers are now ubiquitous, and it's effects range from annoying to painful, as anyone that has experienced migraine can attest. Regarding the actual light LED produces, nearly all LED available are weighted towards the blue spectrum, and this light has been shown to massively mess with wildlife and shorten human lifespans by years by messing with circadian rhythms, which strangely can lead to diabetes and heart disease. LED proponents are obsessed with brightness, but this is also a trap, because brightness is not as important as what can be seen. Consensus among lighting and eye experts is that more can be seen with a dimmer light that reproduces color perfectly than with a much brighter light that does not. As we mitigate these issues with LED, the drivers become more expensive and the LEDs become less efficient. And as the article mentions, the phosphors of better color-producing LEDs will fade rather quickly and over time no longer reproduce colors accurately. And best LED can ever achieve is to perfectly match what incan does with little to no development, What it looks like, if the trend can be detected, is that as we fully mitigate the problems with LED, the more expensive it becomes until its cost and durability nearly reaches parity with what we already had with incandescent. It's becoming a wash.
Most of the capital invested in incandescent technology was related to the Phoebus cartel. The pressure to make incandescent efficient was just never there until very recently.
LED has severe problems, some solvable, some not. The article mentions flicker, but really should have specified. Nearly all LED drivers employ PWM. There are constant current LED drivers, and they are more efficient than PWM drivers, but PWM drivers are cheaper to design and manufacture. While many will claim PWM doesn't bother them because they can't detect it, they're not only exhibiting callousness for those that are bothered and harmed by PWM, they're falling into a fallacious trap, i.e. what they don't know and can't detect can't harm them, which is patently false, and one counter example is carbon monoxide. PWM LED drivers are now ubiquitous, and its effects range from annoying to painful, as anyone that has experienced migraine can attest.
Regarding the actual light LED produces, nearly all LED available are weighted towards the blue spectrum, and this light has been shown to massively mess with wildlife and shorten human lifespans by years by disrupting circadian rhythm, which strangely can lead to diabetes and heart disease.
LED proponents are obsessed with brightness, but this is also a trap, because brightness is not as important as what can be seen. Consensus among lighting and eye experts is that more can be seen with a dimmer light that reproduces color perfectly than with a much brighter light that does not.
As these issues with LED are mitigated, the drivers become more expensive and the LEDs become less efficient. And as the article mentions, the phosphors of better color-producing LEDs will fade rather quickly and over time no longer reproduce colors accurately. And let's realize that the best LED can ever achieve, what the technology has always been striving for, is to perfectly match what incan does with little to no development. Maybe someday LED light will perfectly match incan light, but it is not today and it isn't next year.
What it starts to look like, if the trend can be detected, is that as we fully mitigate the problems of LED, the more expensive it becomes until its cost and durability nearly reaches parity with what we already have with incandescent. It's starting to become a wash.
So unlike LED, if incan can be made more efficient, and there is a massive amount of room for improvement in efficiency there, then incandescent undoubtedly will return and dominate the lighting market. I liberally estimated 20 years, but it may take longer, but it really doesn't matter to my major point, which is that incandescent is coming back, and this is a very very good thing, because LED light, as efficient as it is, still absolutely sucks.
It seems like this could be done differently, and perhaps more cost-effectively. Can't give cites right now, but here's a path I'd explore if I were in the field.
I'd pattern the inner surface of the glass envelope with a cube texture - think of taking a cube and pressing a corner normally into a clay surface, then removing the cube. This pattern is a so-called corner reflector, and returns incident light to its source. Figure the cube indentations at about 0.5mm deep, close packed. I'd deposit a dielectric film reflector stack tuned to reflect most infrared radiation onto this surface.
This combination would transmit visible light, but would reflect IR directly back to the filament, reducing the amount of electrical power needed to maintain filament temperature. Glass textural molding and dielectric film deposition are mature technologies. I think this could readily triple incandescent lamp power efficiency, maybe even better.
Perhaps the planned obsolescence helped the consumer, because perhaps there would have been no willing producers if producing the lightbulbs at a price the users were willing to pay for wasn't going to turn out to be profitable, with respect to setting up production in the first place and then producing until the investment was paid back.
When we're talking market price, we have to acknowledge that it is a meeting of the price needed to bring a product to market and the price the consumer is willing to pay. We can't assume that the price of the longer lasting bulb would have been attractive to consumers, when compared to the price of the shorter-lived bulb, even if they had all the information available.
It's perfectly valid for a person to decide they'll spend more over the long run, rather than ponying up a larger sum now. And it's perfectly valid for producers to take the chance of deciding this for the consumer. As Henry Ford noted, "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."
Was anybody stopping anyone from offering the consumer a higher-priced and longer-lasting bulb?
Yes, but this is exactly what I'm asking. How do I find the ones designed in a buy it for life way? Or at least ones designed to last longer than the crap on the Home Depot shelves.
You can't buy a bulb that is rated to last a lifetime, but you can buy ones rated to last for 10+ years if used 8 hours a day (i.e. 35,000 life hours).
I retrofitted entire house - 200+ bulbs and fixture retrofits more that 5 years ago. I had one or failures since. I bought highest CRI bulbs, i.e. most expensive, and they work well. (Also, do not use bulbs for downlights - get entire "led can light fixture retrofit")
I used 1000bulbs.com because I can filter/read specs there, but you can get specs for any high-tier vendor and buy elsewhere.
Just another thumbs up for 1000bulbs. I've made a small order through there, but I like my bulbs. It seems to get very expensive quickly going beyond 93 CRI.
If you don’t trust the manufacturers, you’ll have to find an expert to trust, or tear down the bulbs and examine them yourself. The best way to know for sure is to measure the current being driven through the LEDs and compare it to their maximum rated current. The ones that don’t last long are usually being run at their maximum current, producing a lot of excess heat which shortens their lives dramatically.
I don't think it's untrustworthy in a sense you are deliberately lied to. I think more likely problem is that there is quality control issues and entire batch of particular bulb is compromised, like can happen with anything else - hard drives, RAM, pencils.
In general it's quite reasonable. Cheaper bulbs failed on me, more expensive ones work just fine for many years.
One thing is I wonder about if phosphorus (or whatever chemical they use) is burning out over the years. I.d. do I get worse light quality as these bulbs age?
I imagine light consumption could be regulated like food could be. As a smoker paying about 20 times more than 40 years ago I feel entitled to say that approach was a good idea.
I've noticed that LED bulb packages say they'll last several years, but so many of them die after just a year or so. I should start tracking this precisely, but I've just gotten the sense that they often die prematurely.
Assuming that the retailer can actually get a refund or replacement from the manufacturer (for some products, only the consumer can actually do that), usually they just replace the item or the wholesale price. They don't replace the retailer's gross margin. Thus the retailer ends up eating the cost of things like stocking and actually processing the warranty. For e.g. a one-person operation, that means extra work for zero profit.
It's usually not that much, but I can see why they might eventually be upset about it.
> The issue is that LED bulbs aren’t simple devices like incandescent bulbs. LED bulbs have an electronic power supply inside which drives the LEDs at a constant current.
Not all of them! I was very surprised to open up my generic outdoor patio LED bulbs and find two strips of LED filament wired directly to power.
AFAICT it’s just enough LEDs in serial for 120VAC at 60 Hz to be “good enough” that they survive for “long enough”.
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.)
Can't wait to become a mini-expert in fucking LED lightbulbs just to have decent lighting in my house. I hate that the vast information of the internet has basically required us mere mortals to try and become experts in literally anything and everything just to be able to buy something that isn't awful. Computer? Better keep up to date on all of the CPU, GPU, etc. info. That doesn't even include the insanity of monitors. Cars? Better spend multiple weekends doing research before spending more weekends being ready to walk away from any dealership just to play the stupid negotiation game.
I feel like I can't just have a casual fun hobby anymore. You have to have all of the knowledge about the entire space just to be able to decide if something may or may not be garage.
> I hate that the vast information of the internet has basically required us mere mortals to try and become experts in literally anything and everything just to be able to buy something that isn't awful.
This has always been the case. The difference now is that with the internet it's within reach.
You don't have to dig through your social network to find someone working for the lighting division of GE. You don't have to visit your local library to check out books on how lightbulbs work in order to figure out which makes one better than another. You just need to hop on Google or ask New Bing.
--
Think all incandescent bulbs were the same? Think again. Manufacturing conditions and filament thickness are two of the several factors involved in how long that lightbulb will last and how bright it will get. Cheap, shitty lightbulbs from discount stores were a thing.
Oh, and one more thing! You're pretty much stuck with one color temperature.
--
There are plenty of examples throughout the 20th century of poorly-made, barely-working tech being sold as acceptable. The plethora of non-electric "vacuum cleaners" sold around the turn of the century are one notable early example. The lightbulbs which came after the agreements made by the Phoebus Cartel are another.
1978! Home video! Do you go with VHS from JVC, Betamax from Sony, SelectaVision from RCA, or DiscoVision from MCA?
For an entertaining diversion, imagine you're living in 1973 and it's time to purchase a new car. Is that Plymouth really going to hold up against your new concerns about gas mileage? How do you know? Do you have any mechanic friends? Do you know anything about how cars work? Does the local library have any books to help?
Random final tidbit: The "older"=="better" myth is the result of the fact that we're not exposed to the junk of yesteryear; only the good stuff. The junk was thrown away years and years ago.
Want to have a decent quality of life at the end of your career? Better spend a large portion of your youth becoming an expert in finance and monetary policy, and hope you don't make a fatal mistake like buying long-term government debt right before inflation starts to run.
> I hate that the vast information of the internet has basically required us mere mortals to try and become experts in literally anything and everything just to be able to buy something that isn't awful.
Awful junk existed before the internet. It’s just that people didn’t have much of a way to know any better, nor did they have many options to choose from. People relied on word of mouth, marketing material, or the shop keeper’s advice to decide what to buy… that is, if the store even had multiple options.
There’s not more crap today, there’s more perspective.
I'm in the same boat. For the sake of simplicity find some good brands and stick to them. Where I live its simple, get all your bulbs at IKEA. Most of them are 90 CRI and other parameters are good too. There are better ones on the market, but I dont want to go on a product hunt if my supplier is out
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.
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.
It's interesting how the led datasheets have all the useful information (spectrum, CRI, angular spread). But once manufacturers put them on a bulb, they will refuse to tell even what leds they used.
At this point I believe companies are willfully refusing to inform their customers.
That could be because putting it on the box creates a liability that the LEDs are meeting those specifications -- just because the source LEDs claim to meet those specifications doesn't mean that the enclosure being sold using them as a component will actually produce that. Additionally, any change to LED suppliers/etc now means that the box also has to be changed.
In other words, what they are selling isn't the same as the thing in the box nor the aggregate of all the components (since they interact with one another).
CRI has to do the hard job of describing a spectrum using a single number. It's like looking at the entire menu of a restaurant and having to say how healthy the food there is. (heck, there's probably way better metaphors).
It does! And it seems that CRI is simply not a useful way to characterize LED light sources, as (i assume) it was established when incandescent and other non-semiconductor light sources were the only option.
To expand your metaphor: it's like judging a dish solely on the balance of flavors while not noticing that the restaurants have started changing the smell of the air, the firmness of the seats, the relative humidity and temperature individually.
And what do you do when the lightbulb burns out after only 3 years? The product has long since changed SKU, the manufacturer gets to claim they fixed any deficiencies (and it'll take years to find out if they are telling the truth), and you long since lost any proof of purchase.
Yeah there's not much you could personally do, other than maybe report it to the California Energy Commission. Bulbs need to be lab tested and the results submitted to the CEC, but I'm not sure how the lifespan testing is actually done, how accurate it is, or how easily it could be manipulated.
This one was a little tricky for me when I was buying bulbs last year. I prefer warm-colored bulbs, and I was kind of confused why Amazon kept on saying it was refusing to ship bulbs to me. It took me a while before I realized it was because I'm in CA and the CRI was too low, and Amazon didn't have a way to just filter by CRI. Eventually my wife just ended up finding some warm-ish LED bulbs at a local store.
It's crazy to me that in 2023, Amazon still refuses to offer meaningful product filtering. The miscategorization of items has been written about many times, and the best explanation for why they're not fixing it is basically "people like digging through piles of trash to find the good stuff". It's an infuriating experience and these days I typically use Google to search Amazon because their basic search will many times fail to show the product when I search for the exact product name or model designation, even when they do in fact carry it. On Google it'll be the first result. Google obviously can't filter Amazon products by category, let alone other parameters, but it's just so frustrating vs using other sites like McMaster-Carr, DigiKey, etc.
> Light source in combination with specified control shall provide “reduced flicker operation” when tested at full light output as specified in JA10, where reduced flicker operation is defined as having percent amplitude modulation (percent flicker) less than 30 percent at frequencies less than 200Hz.
Philips is generally a safe bet, and G.E. + Osram are as well. The generic crap at Home Depot and Amazon and Walmart that costs 1/4 as much will probably perform awful, but could be a hidden gem. Some dead giveaways are total lack of heatsinks and low price, but higher price does not necessarily equal good quality.
Look at the fixtures you're putting them in and consider if they're getting adequate cooling. If your average "long lasting" (they all claim this, but not at what temperature...) LED bulb is uncomfortably hot to touch, it's on the fast track to failure.
Mine are hanging in thin air over my bathroom mirror. The GE Reveal bulbs say they're good for bathrooms, but I suspect they don't like the humidity. I have four at a time in the fixture and six of them have died in the last two years. Once this box is empty I'll get something else.
I had similar issues with Phillips. I bought six over a year for the relatively excellent quality of the light, but they'd start flickering after a month or two. I had first suspected an electrical problem, but then tried them at entirely different locations in entirely different sockets and found the same. Haven't considered buying Phillips since and won't, ever. Nice light, shit construction.
The Phillips bulbs I bought have a ridiculously high failure rate. About half have failed within 6 months. Much worse than the supermarket own brands, or cheaper ones from Amazon.
Meanwhile I replaced around 40 halogen bulbs with Philips branded bulbs around 5 years ago, and have not had a single failure.
It's possible the quality has changed, but i'm also wondering whether the mains voltage might be a factor - there is quite a wide range of possible voltages allowed whilst still being in-spec, so maybe i'm lucky at my properties and mains voltage is on the low end of the standard and maybe you're running hot. It's all most frustrating!
BTW, I went with Philips on the basis that there was a good chance that if I did need to replace a few after a year or two due to failures i'd be likely to be able to source the same bulb, as it's really annoying if you find one bulb a different colour than the others...
The Philips Hue bulbs somehow never burn out. I have about 30 of them in my house, and the oldest ones (5+ years old now) are working as well as the new ones that I have bought recently. They are the only "smart" thing that I have in my house, because they're the only thing I've ever hooked up that worked with 100% reliability. They don't require an internet connection, etc. I never have connection problems, never have to reboot the hub, the switches work for me 100% of the time.
If the warranty expires, buy the same ones from $BIG_BOX_STORE and return the broken ones. The companies send them back to the mfgs for credit. They'll get the hint eventually.
That’s the current problem is knowing when a “Brand” which was a marker for quality cashes in.
Consumer Reports tests a lot of consumer goods and used to be my go to for testing. They don’t take ad revenue so that helps. Though you have to be a member to see their reviews.
> 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?
There is simple heuristic - all LED bulbs are bad. They generally have insufficient heatsink and unreplaceable PSU immediately next to LEDs.
Better are LED tubes (with T12 interface, as a replacement for fluorescent tubes), they have much more area for cooling and for PSU, and sometimes have replaceable PSU. Similarly lighting units with integrated LEDs.
At the end of the day, the author recommends giving filament-style LED bulbs a try, where the emitter is built onto a thin filament away from the circuit housing so it's far away from the heat.
> The big problem for me is, as a consumer, how do I know that brand X is producing quality ${PRODUCT} 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?
That's the million-dollar question of the '10s and '20s (and likely beyond), and is far bigger than just bulbs.
The only solution that I can think of that could work is a distributed rating system with a built-in web of trust. It theoretically shouldn't be that difficult for people to adopt, if only they got collectively fed up with the universe of crap we have now, and someone provided a nice app and protocol to federate information with.
(direct regulation of quality, vendor-controlled ratings, and browsing Reddit/HN comment threads are all fatally flawed non-solutions)
I was going to dismiss your comment as being naive. Because every generation before us had to deal with the problem of "how do I know that I'm getting quality item X from supplier Y?" See the clay tablet complaining about the quality of a bronze shipment. The answer really is "you have to test it" and frankly return policies at stores generally support purchase, test, and decide to keep or return. An option that many of our ancestors did not have, and yes not everyone can do this.
On the other hand, Daniel Kahneman was awarded a Nobel prize in 2002 for researching with Amos Tversky on how we make decisions, and how having more options makes our eventual decision less fulfilling as we suspect that we probably did not make the optimal decision. However, done is better than perfect. At least that's what some people say.
Given that we have multiple technology purchases to make, all of which will involve "research" and making decisions it is very frustrating, to me, that we do not have more reliable trustworthy guidance. There are competent review organizations and websites but they more frequently tend to be owned by product manufacturers and funded by advertisers. We know that marketing tries to create desire in our primitive consumer brains.
And as individuals with deep and long experience in at least one or more areas, we have our own biases that help us make decisions. And if we think carefully about how we gained this expertise, we should conclude that a lot of wasted time and mistakes were involved.
And we know that becoming an expert in lighting, spectral, power consumption, lifetime, CRI, etc could take a long time and there would be more to learn as the engineers create new solutions (blue LED plus yellow phosphor, or RGB LEDs, COB or something else...).
So to answer your question. You won't know that brand X produces quality bulbs that last a long time until you purchase and test them. Assume that they won't last a long time, don't buy the most expensive option, there will be improvements in LEDs and bulbs that will make your next purchase even better.
To sift past the marketing to get actual quality, well we do have some well known brands that distribute through well known stores. Buying from Alibaba or the dollar store is not going to result in the best outcome, but it might. Put those options aside as an experiment rather a "must make me happy now" experience.
How do you know that a product won't slip in quality over time? Well you won't know until you make that purchase. This happens all of the time with everything from salt ("Himalayan" salt with rocks, sea salt with microplastics, honey adulterated with sugar, olive oil with other oils)...
We live in a very interesting time, we no longer have to "follow the herd" or "hunt for the roots" in new locations. We're mostly protected from weather, earthquakes, famine, etc (exception occur). Our health generally good. There is however dog poop on the sidewalk and pot holes in the roads.
So when the grocery store moves your familiar product to another aisle, or changes their product line up, or increases the price, these are all opportunities to step out of "cruise control" and experience the uncertainty that comes with a constantly changing world.
"Marriage has no guarantees. If that's what you're looking for, go live with a car battery." - Erma Bombeck
> Because every generation before us had to deal with the problem of "how do I know that I'm getting quality item X from supplier Y?"
Up to 70 years ago, item X had an extremely low complexity, and up to some 30 years ago, supplier Y had reliably constant quality between its products.
No previous generation had to deal with the problem we currently have.
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.
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.
The only bulbs I've found that work in tight enclosures without overheating and failing are a design that's probably 90% aluminum heatsink by weight and over 50% by volume, with a relatively small dome diffuser on top. I couldn't find a US distributor, so bought a box direct from the manufacturer on Alibaba. They were $20+ per bulb even from the factory, so not cheap. Beyond the crazy cooling, they have a thermal shutoff feature to prevent failure if they get too hot. Generally it's better to find an appropriately breathable fixture for LED bulbs, or even better, ditch retrofit bulbs and get something with a separate DC power supply.
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.
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.
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?
This is the tragedy of modern times in the West. Hard to get anything quality without tons of research. Not even about the money, there's just too much noise
Yes, exactly. It’s one thing to need to be an expert to find a diamond in the rough. It’s another to not be able to guarantee you’ll get a premium product by going to a reputable retailer and picking out an expensive whatever. That’s the really frustrating part.
I think the issue is that there are no more reputable retailers. Just amazon, which more than half the time isn’t even amazon.
No, the lightbulbs at home depot are inexpensive and they work fine. On the other hand, if you care about CRI, then you can also google for high-quality bulbs with a good CRI. I don't really see a problem here?
The problem is I used to be able to spend a couple dollars on lightbulbs that consistently looked great and didn’t require a ton of research or money. I’ve bought hundreds and hundreds of dollars worth of high-end LED lightbulbs since moving into my new place last year, and the lighting here still looks like crap. Even with budget it’s hard to get something that looks good. Finding something that dims without flickering, the issue with dimming not actually warming like mentioned in the article, trying to match color temperatures to actually look good, so many issues. I’ve tried to splurge and get good lights and good dimmers but I’m still not happy with how it’s turned out. And if you go in any home or restaurant where they haven’t dedicated substantial time and money into good lighting, things are downright painful these days. I desperately miss incandescent bulbs. I’ve been told by several people that I seem oddly sensitive to this, but it’s a huge deal as far as I’m concerned.
Check out WAC lighting. You'll pay for the quality, but it's there. Work with a local lighting store to guarantee results. There are other high-end brands too, but WAC are very popular and what many high-end hotels and restaurants use.
Thats the kind of fixtures you find in the homes of people who got their wealth by robbing the poor.
I searched for "A19" since thats the kind of bulb type that a regular old joe like me has. Just one match and its only 80 CRI. Thats not anywhere competitive with what else has been suggested in this thread.
The problem is that previously the low-effort default option was great, and now the low-effort default option is bad and to get the equivalent of the previous great default you must now spend a bunch of extra time and money. "Caring about CRI" is basically just caring about the human visual system working correctly, that shouldn't be some weird niche.
Besides, I don't control the lighting decisions of every place I go that's not my own home. And many people might be impacted in tiny ways without even noticing (cf. the old research about fluorescent lighting in schools/offices impacting mood or concentration or whatever).
I bought Feit lightbulbs at a big box home store (not the cheapest option). Half of the 6 I bought failed in 6 months. The rest seem to be going strong at least…
THD by me doesn't even stock the CREE bulbs anymore, just the crappy FEIT generics.
I had to drive all over town to find a specialty lighting store with some 'real' Sylvania brand. (But then found the supermarket across the street has Philips on the shelf. Oof.)
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.
> 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).
I mean… just here in this comment section are suggestions for suppliers of premium LEDs that I would trust based on the karma rating of the people who posted the links.
Googling for “premium LED high ratings 95 cri” or searching on Amazon definitely isn’t going to work, because they will just send you to the highest bidder, or the most proficient scammer.
The comment section is great , but if I need to find out quality of a random consumer product, what is the chance I will find it in this comment section? like 1%?
I feel like I’ve been able to make decently informed choices without too much hassle…
Recent purchases include usb cables, rechargeable batteries & USB power pack, LCD monitor, SSDs, multivitamins, torque wrench, belt sander, pressure washer, washing machine, gluten-free pastas and baking mixes, video games…
LED bulbs are kind of a pathological case, along with things like USB cables, speaker wire... If you want something better than the lowest common denominator it’s very hard because they are nearly indistinguishable from the outside and take a long time to fail.
But for example shopping and comparing washing machines online wasn’t terrible. You can narrow down the list very easily based on your requirements and budget, probably you end up with 2 choices that both seem great, you can watch videos of them running, and then you pick the one assembled in your home country or the one that makes a more pleasant ding when it turns on, and call it a day? Obviously the “reviews” are all fake, but the point isn’t for someone to tell you what to buy, but that all the options are readily discoverable while I’m lying in bed on my phone.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I use 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.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Here is one common vendor: 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.