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Comment by clolege | Hacker News Reader

I grabbed some high temperature, high-CRI LEDs from http://waveformlighting.com 2 years ago and they have helped a lot. I love them because the CRI make the colors in my house look fantastic.

I put some strips around the window in my office, and plugged a bunch of A19 bulbs into a string patio lightbulb strip in my living room. Many of the bulb lights burned out quickly though, I think because they have cheap power supplies and were interfering with each other? Kinda stinks.

At the end of the day though I wish I had lights that met 3 conditions:

• Give off high CRI, full spectrum, high temperature light

• Contain simple electronics controlled by a dimmer rather than wifi-enabled

• Gradually turn on and off with the sunrise/sunset

Is there anything in the market right now for that?

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> At the end of the day though I wish I had lights that met 3 conditions: • Give off high CRI, full spectrum, high temperature light • Contain simple electronics controlled by a dimmer rather than wifi-enabled • Gradually turn on and off with the sunrise/sunset Is there anything in the market right now for that?

There are high lumen, high CRI, 5k color temp ‘highbay’ (used for warehouse lighting) fixtures available in the commercial market.

Example, puts out 40-60k lumens at 5k color temp and 90CRI: https://cree.widen.net/s/nmxpvrvfdw/the-edge-high-output-hig...

That fixture is 0-10v dimming capable, you could pair it with a photocell, room controller, and dimmer from a commercial lighting controls line to handle the automatic raise/lower and manual dimming.

These are ‘available’ in a sense, if you can find an electrical distributor to open an account you can buy these, but it isn’t as easy as just going to Home Depot.

The downside is, it’s probably $400-500 for the Cree highbay, and another $500 for a photocell, room controller, and dimmer. Then you need to wire it all up, and program the controls.

Good lighting is more valuable than art!

But also my time is probably more valuable than it'd take me to figure all this stuff out.

The sun and my waveforms will have to hold me over until something better hits the market :)

I too am looking for extremely high CRI bulbs, preferably warm, 1600-2200K. Or adjust temperature. If anyone knows how to select these, please post.

CRI didn’t end up being the common consumer metric I hoped it would be. I have to rely on supplementing efficient LED lighting with inefficient halogen lights to be able to do color-sensitive activities like cooking food / monitoring skin health / some DIY electronics work. Also high CRI just contributes to overall quality of life / well-being across most activities.

Interesting that OP had good experiences with Waveform lights, I've been looking at those but haven't bothered yet due to the price.

My holy grail is both very high CRI (well, more accurately a spectrum that matches noon daylight) and also possibility to "dim" into the deep reds and near-infrared mimicking a dimmed-down incandescent bulb or a dying fire. But given the cost of deep-red LEDs, I don't think we're getting those cheaply anytime soon.

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