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Comment by eig | Hacker News Reader

The irony of this article is that the author is suffering from “too much choice”. LEDs have so much more capability than fluorescent and halogen bulbs that the burden has fallen on the consumer to sort out what dimmability, temperature, and lumens they need. It used to be that you only had one option so you didn’t have to think about it.

Anyone who works in stage lighting or art knows that light is complicated. We should not fault the technology for now giving us too many options, but instead improve the branding and advertising.

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I had a similar reaction to the article.

I actually am opposed to bans on traditional incandescent bulbs but vastly prefer LEDs and have no desire to go back to them.

Using LEDs was a shock to me initially mostly because, as you point out, with traditional household incandescents there wasn't a whole lot of options. So suddenly when I had to pay attention to color profiles and so forth more carefully, I wasn't expecting it.

But I don't see that as a bad thing, I really love all the options, and the better precision in labeling color versus power versus brightness.

One problem I've noted, that others in the thread are pointing to, is that a lot of shoddy manufacturing has taken advantage of many of the claims of LED technology to push unacceptable products. One of my pet peeves is how I've suddenly seen fixtures with integrated bulbs take over lighting departments, poorly constructed and forcing you to remove the entire fixture rather than just the bulb, when it dies after a year, much earlier than promised. But I guess even there it's just moved me to more selective lighting stores where I can still buy better fixtures separately from the bulbs.

I do think there's something to be said about declines or fraud in lightbulb manufacturing quality compared to what is possible, but I see that as a scourge of our age and not something unique to LEDs. I have as much trouble finding a quality lightbulb as I do a quality pair of pants.

> I actually am opposed to bans on traditional incandescent bulbs

AFAIK, there are no simple bans on them [ EDIT: in the USA ]. What exists are energy performance standards, which these bulbs do not meet. If you want, you can say that this is nit-picking, and that of course that's a ban.

But when we have energy performance standards for, say, cars, nobody says it is a ban on cars, just a effective end to the production of inefficient ones.

Where the standards are set isn’t arbitrary.

If LEDs were exactly as efficient as incandescent bulbs there wouldn’t be a law that bans all lightbulbs. Also there’s no way a law would pass that sets the efficiency standard of incandescent bulbs because the law would do nothing.

It’s a ban on incandescent bulbs with the thinnest veneer of generalization.

The thing is, a simple carbon tax is already designed to handle both of these cases. Burning coal/gas would have a cost proportional to the long term effects it has, and at the end of the day customers just see a price of electricity. If someone wants to pay 10x more for energy to power their lightbulbs, let them. As long as the energy they buy is sustainably sourced, who gives a shit how they use it?

What happened to CFL bulbs? I was very happy with mine, but they have rapidly disappeared from shelves.

They contain mercury - that alone makes them a terrible idea. I suspect they are also less efficient and more expensive to make than LED bulbs, while also having a shorter lifespan and various other drawbacks like not liking quick cycling, not being instant-on, etc.

But if we said cars need to achieve over 1000mpg, then it would be effectively a ban on ICE, right?

In practice yes. However, someone might also just say "No more ICE" and that is semantically different. Sure, in the real world, no practical difference.

...Some people like me do call those bans.

Can't buy incandescents in California anymore. Try on Amazon, it won't sell to you.

So far I've had better experiences with integrated lighting than individual bulbs. Normally the integrated lighting means they've got more space to try and cram things like power supplies in there and can use a lot of the actual fixture to cool down the electronics. Meanwhile, fixtures designed to not care about the bulbs getting hot roast the LED bulbs and can cause early failure.

Maybe we've just had bad luck. Our integrated lights all failed in less than a year, whereas our bulbs have all lasted a few years at least so far without any failures or apparent changes.

I've had very good luck with the integrated fixtures. I have a number of them in my house and only one has failed (of maybe a dozen). This is a lot lower than the failure rate of LED bulbs. They are far brighter than the lights they replaced, and I personally like their lower profile. I also installed a number of the integrated fixtures in my father's house, and the increased brightness helps him quite a bit (he's 80).

On the other hand, the integrated bulb/fixtures in our house at least use separate driver units, and seem to be lasting much better than the average mains-voltage LED bulb (the oldest is 8 years old, used every day and still going strong, touch wood).

It is quite interesting that 2700K is often considered to be a "normal" color temperature, even though it is much yellower than sunlight (around 5000K, depending on atmospheric scattering). This stems purely from a technological limitation of incandescent bulbs. The bulb filaments simply cannot withstand a temperature significantly above 2700K. Even though LED bulbs have no such limitations, a color temperature of only 2700K is often chosen.

Most people have an expectation that residential lighting is on the "warm" (low color temperature!) side. I have a lot of Hue and Sengled bulbs in the house which are tunable and my son complains that they look "harsh" when they are set to a high color temperature. Myself I do art projects that require making fine sensory distinctions and it clear to me that I can do that better with more blue light.

I've seen high-quality incandescent bulbs however that do very well on my tests despite being "warm" but I think a lot of people like using daylight from out the north window for evaluating prints and it was was a revolution a few decades back when art museums realized that higher color temperature lights brought out colors better.

> Myself I do art projects that require making fine sensory distinctions and it clear to me that I can do that better with more blue light.

That’s what it’s good for. But do you want that lighting in your living room while you watch tv?

The TV is a good example because the light from TV is transmitted light, like a stained glass window. The TV can create the widest range of perceptual experience if it has R, G and B colors that are precise spectral lines.

If I'm looking at color prints in a book or on the wall that is reflective light and it is dependent on the spectrum of the room. My main TV room has RGB Hue lights that can simulate "warm" or "cold" light but also specific colors. I think 100% green is the ideal light for hot summer days because a full spectrum is also coming in the windows and it gives the most light for the minimum amount of heat. I also find other colors fun sometimes. The guest room that also has a TV has sengled lights that can be tuned from cool to warm.

RGB lights that can produce saturated colors are not going to render reflective colors so well, see

https://blog.kasson.com/the-last-word/metameric-failure/

Personally I like high color temperature light but with the system we have we can have it any way we like. If I really need accurate color rendition I bring in high-performing spot incandescent and maybe someday LEDs. My work is all "born digital" so I spend at least 80% of my time looking at screens and looking at prints, handling paper and such is a small but essential fraction of that.

What I really gotta do though is set my system up so it can vary the room color together with what's on TV, that ought to be cool.

Its CRI

Sunlight is great during the day but in the evening, you want to be closer to the color of sunsets and campfires.

For this reason I think it's great to connect different temperature bulbs to each light switch in your house and switch between them during the day. I keep all of my bulbs on during the daytime and then switch to just the warm ones at night.

> For this reason I think it's great to connect different temperature bulbs to each light switch in your house and switch between them during the day. I keep all of my bulbs on during the daytime and then switch to just the warm ones at night.

If you care that much about that, it would probably make more sense to get something like Philips Hue bulbs that can vary their color temperature.

I have hue builds in my house and have them programmed to warm their color temperature as the day progresses into the evening, and dim themselves down significantly as it gets later.

Not just incandescent filament bulbs, the original artificial light was literally incandescent - gas lamps, oil lamps, beef tallow, candles, tallow etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rushlight

There is another benefit to <3000K indoor lighting: lighting is usually used in the evening, close to bed time. So a warmer light helps with people's circadian rhythm in preparing for sleep. Remember that light at sunset also becomes warmer.

If all your indoor lighting was 5000K, then it would be like you would be living your indoor life constantly at noon.

It's why software like f.lux was created (and the functionality has been incorporated into some OSes as well).

I believe this is more folklore than science. A significant color shift happens only for a couple of minutes during sunrise and sunset. The change in brightness is probably significant, but it is hard to believe that the color has a significant physiological effect (but the placebo could be very strong!). In my experience, f.lux and co. make it pretty difficult to read text due to the low contrast, and simply changing the screen brightness is much more effective.

What's true for outdoor lighting is just as true for indoor lighting:

> It is crucial to control upward-directed light, but we now know that the color of light is also very important. Both LED, and metal halide fixtures contain large amounts of blue light in their spectrum. Because blue light brightens the night sky more than any other color of light, it’s important to minimize the amount emitted. Exposure to blue light at night has also been shown to harm human health[1] and endanger wildlife[2]. IDA recommends[3] using lighting that has a color temperature of no more than 3000 Kelvins.

* https://www.darksky.org/our-work/lighting/lighting-for-citiz...

> A significant color shift happens only for a couple of minutes during sunrise and sunset.

This seems like a very dubious claim - the "golden hour" is obvious to everyone, and there's an intuitive mechanism for sunlight being "warmer" in the morning and evening (blue gets scattered in proportion to the amount of air it travels through). Do you have a citation for this?

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30311830/

> Further analysis of these 15 reports indicated that a two-hour exposure to blue light (460 nm) in the evening suppresses melatonin, the maximum melatonin-suppressing effect being achieved at the shortest wavelengths (424 nm, violet)

> The melatonin concentration recovered rather rapidly, within 15 min from cessation of the exposure, suggesting a short-term or simultaneous impact of light exposure on the melatonin secretion.

For evening humans are more used to to campfire color temp than to the sun.

For daylight, people typically prefer daylight (5000K) bulbs.

> Even though LED bulbs have no such limitations, a color temperature of only 2700K is often chosen.

I think there's a reason for this, which is that sunlight supplements indoor lighting during the day. People rely on indoor lighting more at night when those warmer tones are most desirable.

5000k is really uncomfortable in a living area. Fine for work but not relaxing. Just living with 5000k lights for a while won’t change that.

I personally think high color temperature lighting is harsh, like hospital harsh.

Nowadays the situation is better, but for years after incandescents were banned in California, the only LED bulbs available in stores had a huge spike in the blue part of the spectrum, which I experienced as painful and now know probably caused the death of some of the cones in my retina through oxidative stress.

(I am over 60 and have some health problems that chronically elevate my levels of oxidative stress -- in all cell types, though the light-detecting cells in the retina are more vulnerable than other types of cells are.)

I.e., I wanted to buy an LED that vaguely approximated a 2700K incandescent, tried many brands, but could not find one, so I don't know what you are on about.

Bright blue light will make a brain more alert -- and the effect is immediate. That is probably why you young people like it, but I am baffled by your "a color temperature of only 2700K is often chosen" (not that color temperature is a useful way of summarizing the spectrum of and LED bulb).

For reference, a candle has a color temperature around ~1800K (with some spots of the candle emitting ~2600K)...

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Candle-shows-different-c...

I'd imagine that the "warm" color temperature is modeled after candle and gas lighting but after reading some articles on the history of light bulbs it seems that all the folks working on it were trying to make the brightest, whitest light they possibly could. Today's "daylight" bulbs would probably be perceived as an engineering wonder by those folks.

Humans have used fire probably for their entire evolutionary history. Before language and but after stone tools. The desire for a light spectrum at night similar to what a fire gives off surely comes mostly from that long genetic history.

It used to be that you only had one option so you didn’t have to think about it.

But, that single option was at least "good enough". I never bought a normal incandescent bulb only to have the color rendering/brightness/etc be downright awful.

LEDs come packaged as "daylight" or "bright white" or whatever else. I want one that's labelled "just like your normal 60W incandescent".

Sure but it’ll cost $100. The efficiency of LEDs is a joke when you factor in materials, manufacturing, and subjective utility. We’re paying more for worse.

For a "lifetime" bulb that doesn't make me crazy, I'd gladly pay $100. Well, maybe not quite, but certainly more than whatever I pay now for mid-grade (by HD/Lowes standards) bulbs.

> But, that single option was at least "good enough"

It wasn't if you wanted a good amount of light without having kW heater over your head.

I've found the color/brightness of the GE Relax HD (Yeah, they go one step further and label the color temperature as "Relax HD") to be pretty good. Lifespan has been hit and miss in semi-enclosed fixtures though.

Power supplies in all GE bulbs are total horseshit.

Their new bulbs with the selectable color temperature gutted the product of its remaining redeeming features. The cost of the extra LEDs in the bulb is coming out of the quality of the remaining components.

> But, that single option was at least "good enough".

Was it? Or was it what we were all used to, good or not, so we accepted it as good/correct.

Effectively every incandescent bulb has good CRI and can be dimmed, so yes.

And the single option was cheap. There are cheap LEDs, but they're going to flicker, or hum audibly, and die quickly (contrary to the advertising). It's taken many rounds of trial and error, many wasted dollars, and I still don't love the bulbs I've landed on that much.

I highly disagree about it being good enough. Those bulbs got hot and were expensive to run over the life of the bulb. I like a lot of light, so I'd often end up buying lots of 100W lightbulbs throughout my house. My kitchen would have like 6x100W lightbulbs on for several hours a day, so ~3.6kWh/day. At $0.11/kWh that's $11.88/mo just lighting my kitchen. $142.56/year to light one room one quarter of the day. And that's before thinking about how much extra heat I'm adding to my house when I'm spending tons of money running an AC to pump heat out of it. Add up all the rest of the lights in my house, its a lot of money just to have the lights on over a year.

For comparison, a similar lumen setup with LED lights in my kitchen runs ~$19/yr to operate. ~13W compared to ~100W. I spent probably less than $80 total swapping out the bulbs and have not had any early failures after a couple of years. The quality of the lights are excellent, in fact in some ways better as I'd prefer closer 5000K in a kitchen as opposed to 2500K.

My "good enough" was with regard to light quality. Operating costs are definitely much higher for incandescent bulbs, no question.

They mostly all were pretty awful.

Twenty years ago I remember a lot of PR about "full spectrum" incandescents and flourescents - no LEDs then! - there was a lot of talk at the time about Seasonal Affective Disorder.

I bought a few different options to check out, and looked at some photo prints under them. They blew the "basic" incandescents away, the photos popped and looked much more lively instead of yellow-tinted and dim.

I think it was worse in the past. I had to chose a daylight, warm or soft bulb. Now I buy one bulb capable of changing color temp and brightness from my couch and it lasts way longer. This is exactly the kinda thing sci fi had when I was a kid and now its in every room of my house.

What if you don't want to become an expert, which is something that wouldn't scale for every piece of tech and equipment? (Maybe you enjoy tweaking with lights, but what about chairs, tabletop materials, woods, wall paints, and yes -- electronic gadgets?).

With LEDs, what's the "I don't want to deal with this, I just want something that will work as intended and not introduce weird artifacts"?

>With LEDs, what's the "I don't want to deal with this, I just want something that will work as intended and not introduce weird artifacts"?

That sounds like an ideal situation the free market should be fixing -- so why isn't it?

I think it does? I go into a home improvement store, grab a dimmable bulb on the warmer side, and screw it in. That's pretty much the sum total of my dealing with LED bulbs.

The problem is that the "dimmable" LEDs I have aren't actually dimmable, they just get flickery.

The article has a similar sentiment: it's hard to translate from what the box says to how it'll actually perform in the real world.

Because EU banned the free market. The ideal would have been a slow transition where LEDs would have had to compete with bulbs.

Like the others I want to buy an LED where the visible light cannot be meassured differently from a normal one, and with the guarantee that I can return it for a full refund if it fails before the 20k hours are up.

The free market will never fix that, because there is no profit in making it easy for you, nor in offering an unlimited return.

why are you acting like you need a college credit in an LED survey course in order to buy incandescent-replacement LEDs? It's like a new vocabulary of like 5 terms/concepts that can all be summarized in a sentence or two.

When I upgraded my house, I spent maybe 30 min reading some articles and then 30 more going through product listings [1]. To upgrade a core piece of infra for my whole house.

[1] I can already hear people saying "an HOUR???" But guess what now I know about LED bulbs forever.

> why are you acting like you need a college credit in an LED survey course in order to buy incandescent-replacement LEDs? It's like a new vocabulary of like 5 terms/concepts that can all be summarized in a sentence or two.

I hope by "you" you are also including TFA and the comment I was replying to, right?

Your response directly contradicts TFA. I don't know who is right, I just know I'm not entirely satisfied with the LEDs I have. It's not my most pressing concern, but I'd rather not have to deal with 5 concepts when picking a lightbulb.

The article isn't some authoritative source. It's the Strategist, which can best be summed up as just some people with opinions.

Doesn't this also apply to people on HN?

I generally buy the lamps that say "warm white". They're usually the 2700k variety. I've literally never had an LED light go out and the colours look fine. Philips lamps seem like a good bet, though I remember seeing an in depth YouTube review that showed that IKEA actually had better colour representation (many brands add an extra dose of red light to boost the warm colours).

Not skimping on lamps helps prevent most problems, usually. IKEA sells great LED lights over here in Europe, for prices that had me worried at first. Most other budget stores and brands sell lamps that mostly emit warm light but will make any food look disgusting from missing wavelengths; fine for lighting a hallway maybe, but generally not worth it in my opinion. It's mostly these bottom of the barrel lamps that people buy, not knowing about the effects cheap lighting can have, that cause visual problems.

It makes sense: back in the day, a cheap lamp may not have lasted as long ,but the colour profile was nearly identical. If you were fine buying a lamp every year, you could just grab the cheapest bulb on the shelf. With anything beyond incandescent light, that's not true anymore.

The difference between a €5 lamp and a €10 lamp is quite significant and worth it considering they'll probably last you at least five years anyway. My personal approach is to look for "warm white" (or 2700k if they use that instead), not pick the very cheapest lamp I can find, and if that leaves multiple options, start comparing statistics like CRI.

I totally agree- that's why I think we need better branding and marketing in stores. I personally like the Costco model of "do the research for the consumer and give them limited choices" but it's easy to see how this could go wrong too.

I'm sure early incandescent lightbulb manufacturers had a lot of shoddy products and consumers just had to figure out which brands to trust themselves. Eventually, it'll even out for LEDs too.

Yup.

It's unfortunate many of us are not used to terms like lumens that are objectively better than using terms like wattage.

However I do feel over the past few years they have become much better at displaying the important terms on the front of the package.

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