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Comment by kosma | Hacker News Reader

This is exactly my experience. Cheap Chinese LEDs seem like a bargain until you discover they are not spec'd beyond "they emit light". The steep price you pay for CREE and other brand-name LEDs is for a product that actually lives up to its datasheet.

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I have gotten some good Chinese filament LED bulbs from eBay, but it is very hit or miss. I did not analyze them for the quality of the output beyond "it looks good to me". The total cost is lower than CREE and other brands even if I consider that I had to throw away half of them due to a poorly manufactured batch that had an audible electric whine and failures of the higher output models after a month or two.

If you are willing to buy multiple times what you need to make up for the quality issues, you can get a decent deal with the cheap Chinese ones. The ones that whined and the ones that did not whine had a fabric covering the wires at the base of the bulbs. If I had some way of knowing which eBay merchants were selling those, I would get a much better deal.

By the way, Nichia is a Japanese company.

Buy cheap, buy twice. Even if you get a good one, no-brand Chinese bulbs just don't last. They're badly engineered and use cast-off LED chips that nobody else wants. I made the mistake of buying some Chinese LED lamps for my utility rooms and outbuildings; they all died within 18 months.

Philips and Osram LED lamps just aren't that expensive. Cheaping out just isn't worth the hassle.

"Buy-twice" methods like this further convince me that a stronger incentive is needed to ensure such junk is not manufactured but is integrated into what many are calling a "circular economy". I wish it was the responsibility of the manufacturers to take back all failed and end-of-life products and recycle the materials such that their waste output was minimal. Likewise, the I wish the wholesaler and retailers were responsible to take back the product from the purchaser or consumer and send it back upstream (and not drop it in the dumpster like Costco does).

I wish there was some drop dead easy way for this. Like you just hand these items to the postman or the like. Dead batteries, outdated electronics, broken electronics, etc.

They are around the 12 month mark now. I will know if they make the 18 month mark 6 months from now.

Buying a lot of crap and doing your own QA has some horrible negative externalities... This sort of throwaway economy is the last thing we need.

This is opposite to the linked post.

The post stated they received LEDs in excess of expectation for quality and low cost for small production run size.

They got the quality and more.

If interested, ask how.

Nichia is a Japanese company.

Quality vs Throughput right here.

I had the experience dealing with some Japaneses companies when they tested the chips we developed. Their level of testing surpassed what most of the companies in the US here do when they qualify a part. They don't take your word on the specs and do their own testing when possible.

Watch Gung Ho for a mostly-accurate comedy relating to this.

Trivia fact:

Nichia is not only a Japanese company, but they are the inventors of the now ubiquitous GaN blue-LEDs; or at least Shuji Nakamura was working there when he invented them.

The company the author refers to in the article is not Chinese.

The article is about him calling someone at Nichia USA[1] to acquire some LEDs and complaining about all the cheap crap flooding ebay from China. The comment above is perfectly appropriate.

[1] Nichia is a Japanese company with US offices.

True of most of the Chinese 'manufacturers' (usually just encapsulators) I've bought from. Hoewever, there are reliable Chinese manufacturers that hit spec reliably. It's just hard to sort the wheat from the chaff.

> It's just hard to sort the wheat from the chaff.

From the people I've talked to, it's impossible without being on the ground in the manufacturing center (and/or hiring a manufacturing fixer who is).

Also, if you order in large amounts test constantly because it's pretty simple to send good stuff for the first few shipments

I've heard that's a problem also. The first run will be agreeable, then subsequent runs are continually "optimized" until someone gripes.

Yes, and those select few supply Foxconn, Compal and Quanta. What you get on the open market is the rejects from those big contracts.

I bought a red cob led from AliExpress to go with some white ones for my plants. I got curious about the red nm frequency being used and dropped the seller a question about it. I loved the reply I got back...

Friend, they are red.

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