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Comment by jchw | Hacker News Reader

Some bulbs will give you information on their CRI which ideally should be required to be labeled on the bulbs packaging the way calorie information is required on food packaging (but I don't think it is.) That will tell you roughly how good the quality of the light is by proxy of the spectrum of light it covers. On the other hand, there is no equivalent afaik for knowing how well the power supply is designed or how hard the LEDs are driven. I guess for that, the consumer can turn to the trusted source for this kind of information, bigclivedotcom. (Sarcasm; but seriously, this is a problem.)

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Can't wait to become a mini-expert in fucking LED lightbulbs just to have decent lighting in my house. I hate that the vast information of the internet has basically required us mere mortals to try and become experts in literally anything and everything just to be able to buy something that isn't awful. Computer? Better keep up to date on all of the CPU, GPU, etc. info. That doesn't even include the insanity of monitors. Cars? Better spend multiple weekends doing research before spending more weekends being ready to walk away from any dealership just to play the stupid negotiation game.

I feel like I can't just have a casual fun hobby anymore. You have to have all of the knowledge about the entire space just to be able to decide if something may or may not be garage.

> I hate that the vast information of the internet has basically required us mere mortals to try and become experts in literally anything and everything just to be able to buy something that isn't awful.

This has always been the case. The difference now is that with the internet it's within reach.

You don't have to dig through your social network to find someone working for the lighting division of GE. You don't have to visit your local library to check out books on how lightbulbs work in order to figure out which makes one better than another. You just need to hop on Google or ask New Bing.

Think all incandescent bulbs were the same? Think again. Manufacturing conditions and filament thickness are two of the several factors involved in how long that lightbulb will last and how bright it will get. Cheap, shitty lightbulbs from discount stores were a thing.

Oh, and one more thing! You're pretty much stuck with one color temperature.

There are plenty of examples throughout the 20th century of poorly-made, barely-working tech being sold as acceptable. The plethora of non-electric "vacuum cleaners" sold around the turn of the century are one notable early example. The lightbulbs which came after the agreements made by the Phoebus Cartel are another.

1978! Home video! Do you go with VHS from JVC, Betamax from Sony, SelectaVision from RCA, or DiscoVision from MCA?

For an entertaining diversion, imagine you're living in 1973 and it's time to purchase a new car. Is that Plymouth really going to hold up against your new concerns about gas mileage? How do you know? Do you have any mechanic friends? Do you know anything about how cars work? Does the local library have any books to help?

Random final tidbit: The "older"=="better" myth is the result of the fact that we're not exposed to the junk of yesteryear; only the good stuff. The junk was thrown away years and years ago.

Want to have a decent quality of life at the end of your career? Better spend a large portion of your youth becoming an expert in finance and monetary policy, and hope you don't make a fatal mistake like buying long-term government debt right before inflation starts to run.

Awful junk existed before the internet. It’s just that people didn’t have much of a way to know any better, nor did they have many options to choose from. People relied on word of mouth, marketing material, or the shop keeper’s advice to decide what to buy… that is, if the store even had multiple options.

There’s not more crap today, there’s more perspective.

I'm in the same boat. For the sake of simplicity find some good brands and stick to them. Where I live its simple, get all your bulbs at IKEA. Most of them are 90 CRI and other parameters are good too. There are better ones on the market, but I dont want to go on a product hunt if my supplier is out

An important point in the article is that CRI for LED bulbs does not meaningfully map to the light quality. >Oh, but: Experts agree that the color-rendering index doesn’t really index how colors are rendered. Some bulbs with a 90 CRI make things look wan; some with an 80 are passable. There are better, more useful metrics, but you can’t have them. Nobody puts them on the packaging. One lighting professional — an LED advocate, no less — told me he sometimes calls up the manufacturer and asks to talk to an engineer to get the real specs.

Yes that's a good point, there's definitely more to it than just CRI. That said, a bulb with very poor CRI definitely sucks, so it's not entirely useless. This seems like one of those things that will suck until it doesn't.

CRI has to do the hard job of describing a spectrum using a single number. It's like looking at the entire menu of a restaurant and having to say how healthy the food there is. (heck, there's probably way better metaphors).

It does! And it seems that CRI is simply not a useful way to characterize LED light sources, as (i assume) it was established when incandescent and other non-semiconductor light sources were the only option.

To expand your metaphor: it's like judging a dish solely on the balance of flavors while not noticing that the restaurants have started changing the smell of the air, the firmness of the seats, the relative humidity and temperature individually.

It's interesting how the led datasheets have all the useful information (spectrum, CRI, angular spread). But once manufacturers put them on a bulb, they will refuse to tell even what leds they used.

At this point I believe companies are willfully refusing to inform their customers.

That could be because putting it on the box creates a liability that the LEDs are meeting those specifications -- just because the source LEDs claim to meet those specifications doesn't mean that the enclosure being sold using them as a component will actually produce that. Additionally, any change to LED suppliers/etc now means that the box also has to be changed.

In other words, what they are selling isn't the same as the thing in the box nor the aggregate of all the components (since they interact with one another).

Which means they're selling marginal stuff.

High end museums for example buy bulbs guaranteed to meet their datasheet specs, at a much higher cost of course.

bigclivedotcom, aka the Consumer Reports of electronics that catch on fire and/or perform miracles.

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