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Comment by squidfood | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, it was because the mandate came when CFLs were still a bit buzzy (or otherwise immature technologically), so it seemed like a quality sacrifice. (no longer of course; we can probably discuss infinitely whether the mandate helped or hindered the tech).

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CFLs are still a quality sacrifice if you care about ease of responsible disposal and the quality of the light. It's fascinating to me to see the divide between people who think fluorescent light is fine and people who are repelled by it.

CFLs also supposedly have a shorter life than incandescents if turned on and off frequently.

My spouse used to be one of the folks who are repelled by fluorescent light. She also failed to notice when I started quietly replacing incandescents with good-quality CFLs.

She did eventually catch on to me, but fortunately the event convinced her to reconsider her opinion.

Light quality really does depend on the bulb. A lot of bulbs are of a color temperature that's neither warm enough, nor close enough to daylight to have a nice feeling. Personally, I've found that the 5500k daylight bulbs to give a much nicer light than even incandescent, but a lot of that is subjective, and most places don't really have a good place to compare light quality.

I actually could not stand fluorscent lights for many years (I would get massive headaches). I recently moved into a new place, and after I light burnt out I was surprised to see a CFL. No issues with headaches and a nice warm white.

CFLs do release mercury, but it's still less mercury than released by coal plants powering inefficient incandescents. Not that I support the ban. And I think there are other problems with CFLs, like causing cancer and affecting sleep (bluer lights cause the brain to produce less melatonin.)

Speaking of which, what kind of light bulbs are people buying these days?

My experience with LED bulbs is that it's hard to find anything as bright as halogens. (I live in an apartment where the main light source takes candelabra-base bulbs, sigh.) They also have super dodgy power supplies and if I put too many on the same circuit the RFI causes my carbon monoxide detector to go off!

I also haven't found any with both a daylight color temperature and a decent CRI. I would like to be able to look at my ColorChecker passport and see the same colors as on my calibrated display. As it stands now if I want to see what color something is in my apartment, I take a picture, apply the profile corrections, and look at it on my monitor!

Any suggestions?

They're not as bright as halogens for sure, but I'm a huge, huge fan of my Philips Hue lights. I share an apartment and brought the lights from my old one; the biggest downer is that they're not dimmer-friendly, so I've had to replace a couple with standard soft-white LEDs, but I love the color range (yeah, they're crappy at green--I don't need green lights) and the configurability to change the way the environment feels.

> what kind of light bulbs are people buying these days

You can't get incandescents anymore in the UK, and I've just bought some halogens in the same form factor. 25× more expensive upfront, but even nicer light.

Set up a few 72W incandescents that you turn on to preview colors?

I am interested in your general question though. My Cree TW have passable colored light, but are just too damn anemic both temperature and intensity. I'm thinking of augmenting with some higher intensity non-CRI-optimized LEDS.

Given that LEDs were inevitably rolling out right about now anyway, helping CFL tech seems totally unnecessary and probably corrupt.

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