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Comment by musicale | Hacker News Reader

LED light bulbs. They are better than they used to be, but they are still awful compared to incandescent bulbs.

They are also inescapable, which means we are cursed with ugly, unpleasant lighting basically everywhere.

Are people really still mad about this?? In my country we switched to LED lights like… 10 years ago, maybe more? It’s not a big deal, we had light, we still have light. I don’t see what makes it "awful, ugly, unpleasant", is it really that bad? That just sounds like a gross overreaction to me but maybe I’m missing something?

My house is about 55 years old, originally it had 3 x 60W bulbs in the living area. So dark. Now it has LED downlights and 2 pendant lights - I added it up to just over 60W, and much brighter. I'll take the modern lighting thanks!

LEDs with a low color rendering index (CRI) make everything look "flat" and even "fake". It's hard to describe.

Part of the issue is that if you go to a hardware store this is what it will be.

A couple of years ago I looked through all the bulbs at my hardware store, they had Chinese brands and name brands like Philips and Osram. None of the bulbs had a CRI higher than 80.

>None of the bulbs had a CRI higher than 80.

I work for an electrical wholesaler and checked. We have 18 bulbs in stock with a CRI higher than 80, which is the average. The lowest is 55.

It's weird. It is not rare to find at a given store that all the name brand bulbs have "CRI > 80" (probably 80.5) and some cheap off-brand product has CRI > 95. You really need to check the labels. IME, high CRI products are otherwise fine as well, e.g. no flicker.

Yes! LEDs are the wrong color, flicker, and are directional plus they burn out in just as much time as a good old incandescent but cost more than 10 times the price and when that happens you can't just dispose of them in the regular household garbage (actually one could). They are only better than the compact fluorescent that were all the rage for a while.

Err LEDs do not burn out at all in the same timeframe as incandescents. If this happened to you, the LED bulbs were defective.

Well that's the problem. There are a lot of low-quality, defective LED bulbs being sold. Consumers don't have an easy way to find good ones. Just paying more or looking for a trusted brand name is no guarantee of quality.

This is true of all consumer products, not LEDs specifically. LED lighting has been mainstream long enough now that you can find plenty of information on which specific brands and models are decent.

My personal anecdote is that I have yet to have any Philips LED bulbs die on me. The oldest ones I have are from 2012.

I bought 8 Osram leds and all died within a year. I complained and got a few for free and those also died, I think even faster.

FYI, Osram is a zombie brand these days. The company was broken up and the consumer lighting brand was sold to some Chinese company that is selling some stuff branded with it.

I've had LED bulbs that lasted for well over a decade. Most seem to be pretty indestructible. But I've got one rail-mounted system using GU-5.3 leds that all seem to die pretty quickly. Not sure what's going on there.

Or the use case. LEDs are quite sensitive to heat, so use in closed or inverted fixtures will decrease their lifetime dramatically.

I am. LED lights are too bright, wrong colours, etc. I will want incandescent lights (including incandescent Christmas lights). We don't need to be very bright, nor does not need to be on all the time (especially, Christmas lights can be made flashy and don't need on all the time). But, often, they are using LEDs that are too bright and wrong colours. (Actually, I had also heard on CBC radio that some scientists also say so, even the ones that they try to make more red than blue, are still wrong)

What does "wrong" mean? Does it mean "not the same as incandescent"?

For me, "wrong" as in "blue glare." It only takes a few minutes for a glare headache to start forming.

Some of it could be because I have defective red/green color vision, but so do about 15% of all males.

+1 for headache-inducing. Perhaps not all of them, but certainly the blue-shifted ones I eventually had to remove from my living room.

white, cold temperature light

LED lights can be exactly as bright or dim as you want them to be, and they exist in many colours. Some are customizable on the spot.

I don't know where you live, but here you can get LEDs in all kinds of color temperatures and brightnesses.

People eat fast food and don't understand why people cook at home. People listen to music on their phone speaker and don't understand why people would buy HiFi speakers. People use the internet without an ad-blocker and don't see a problem with it. What they're missing is what you're missing regarding light bulbs.

The next time you're in a restaurant, public place or somebody's home and notice that you're feeling good and comfortable, try to think about what makes you feel that way. It is probably that they've put thought in things such as illumination.

It's the same with vinyl disks, audiophile headphones, Win7, etc. There's no point arguing about these things.

Low color rendering index (CRI) is often the culprit. Quality LEDs absolutely exist, one must simply do a bit of research in enthusiast forums.

https://budgetlightforum.com/c/other-light-types/led-light-b...

I doubt that is the reason I tend to hate being subjected to bright LED lights for more than about 20 minutes a day.

Most agree that the light from most LED light bulbs (i.e., having a pronounced spike in intensity in the blue wavelengths) is bad for you in the evening and in the night time, but I'm saying I don't even like it in the morning if my exposure is too long (and when I'm having a bady day "too long" might be as short as 10 minutes).

CRI should actually somewhat capture that. If your spectrum looks drastically different from daylight, it will affect color reproduction.

https://www.crslight.com/images/kelvin_cri_comparison_chart....

CRI cannot be the issue with GGGP because he writes that LEDs "are still awful compared to incandescent bulbs" and we know that incandescents (being very low in the blue part of the spectrum compared to its output in the orange and the red) have worse CRI than even the crappy LED bulbs.

CRI is also not why I dislike most LED light bulbs either.

I'm not sure where you're getting that info, but it's wrong. Incandescent are blackbodies and as such have perfect CRI. Their color temperature is different from daylight, but CRI is measured using a source of the same color temperature for reference. A candle also has perfect CRI.

Also, to be clear, I'm not claiming that CRI is the root cause here, rather that it should indicate if there's a spike in the blue.

I bought about 20 halogen ceiling lights for my housei last year when we remodelled. The electrician installing them could not understand why I didn't go for LED. I mumbled something about CRI and R9, but it seemed to just confused him more.

Best decision ever. The lights are dimmable and they have such a beautiful glow. It's so noticeable that guests comment.

I also now buy halogen on sight from the hardware store and stockpile, as their days are surely numbered.

very happy with my waveform lighting LED bulbs:

https://store.waveformlighting.com/products/superwarm-1700k-...

I switched my entire home back to incandescent lights, and put dimmer switches on everything to make them as dim, and warm as possible. High quality incandescent bulbs last effectively forever when dimmed.

Our bodies do so much better when it is dark near bedtime, that the idea of “efficient lighting” to save energy just makes little sense. A person only needs about 20 watts of warm incandescent lighting to read or talk to family after sunset- which costs essentially nothing. We overlight everything because it is so cheap to do, but harms us.

I would like to do this. Are you able to find filament bulbs? What dimmers are you using?

I usually buy them by the box on eBay... but any hardware store will have "special purpose" bulbs even in places where they are banned for general lighting sales, some of which are still basically regular bulbs but labeled for "appliances," "marine," or "rough service." You can also get old fashioned edison bulbs on eBay. Any standard dimmer switch will work.

Let me tell you about color temperature. I have soft warm led light in my workshop. 2700k is a warm indoor yellow color temperature. 5000k is a harsh bright hellish blue.

https://wginc.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/WGI-Color-Tempe...

So you mean cheap LED bulbs. There are warm-white LEDs these days that give a very pleasant warm-white. And you can of course still mix it with normal white and the other colors.

Here in Finland, the only light bulbs to buy are LED light bulbs. They are so much more freaking expensive that old school light bulbs; as for color, there are warmer light options but it is different than old style light bulbs. They tend to last longer and use less power (as advertised), but my understanding is that the old practice of turning off a light if it is not in use for an hour is not worth the bother for LED's; I remember reading that their lifetime is two numbers: number of hours on and number of times it is turned on and off.

Heaven help you if you have a small child in the house that loves to flip the lights on and off.

Eh. I agree that there are a lot of shitty LEDs out there, but any of the Philips bulbs that say "EyeComfort" are actually pretty decent. I have replaced tons of incandescent bulbs with them and it has pretty much always been a noticeable upgrade. No weird shadows, no flickering (I'm super sensitive to this, unfortunately), and their CRI numbers seem legit.

IKEA bulbs are cheap and 2700K, and have also had good results with the Feit electric.

For bed time applications, a guy here was selling the "bed time bulb." I got one and liked it.

Not sure what you expect from your light. But from all the random bulps I've seen and tried I still very much like all my WiZ bulps, their light and also that I can control them with a HTTP API without awkward hacks our cloud weirdness.

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