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Comment by davidcann | Hacker News Reader

Isn't the issue really more about the quality of the light, which can't be captured in photos? CFLs give me headaches after a while, just like big florescent office-style lights.

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In my personal experience, the difference between a crappy CFL and a good CFL is huge. Low-end CFLs are dim, flickery, have a large warm-up period and often worse color. High-end CFLs, on the other hand, can have really nice quality light, good color balance (though I used whiter "full-spectrum" incandescent bulbs, so YMMV), and very little in the way of noticeable warm-up time.

You may still dislike CFLs and that's fine, but you may also have just been exposed to crappy ones.

And it's important to mention that "high end" CFLs now cost about $1 each. You can get bulbs at Home Depot for $4 for a pack of four that turn on immediately, don't flicker, and are available in three color profiles including a warm one that looks very much like an incandescent.

Also important to mention that it is non-trivial to tell the difference between a good, bad or indifferent CFL. Frankly, I'm not interested in doing a product comparison or multiple return trips on a lightbulb.

Where LED is valuable for me is in the dimmable category. I have "dimmable" CFLs and they are terrible, they barely dim and if you lower the dimmer too far they either blink or go off entirely. CFLs are just not dimmable.

Where LED is valuable for me is the absence of mercury. I break an incandescent bulb in my home at least twice a year.

The receptors that cause light to be painful are sensitive to the blue part of the spectrum. Fluorescent tubes tend to load up on that part of the spectrum because it is cheap to do so and high color temperature used to be a luxury feature, not because there is any technical reason to.

Yellow "bug light" CFLs do not cause headaches for me, and are easy to read by. Unfortunately the color rendition is ... poor. It seems that there is no middle ground with CFL engineers.

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