Here is one common vendor: https://store.waveformlighting.com/collections/a19-bulbs/
The issue isn’t that MBAs have cost reduced bulbs for no reason. The issue is that 95% of consumers will only choose the cheap bulbs, period. As a result, that’s what gets produced at scale.
> We know how to mass-produce quality LEDs to the point entire TVs are made of the things.
They’re not the same thing. Displays are optimized for specific R, G, and B color points. White LEDs are optimized for full, smooth spectrums.
And then how do I know that they stick with the high quality approach? What happens when a brand decides to rest on the laurels of their brand name and start slipping in lower quality parts?
I follow his project a bit and it looks like consumers are really at loss. Generally there is no reliable way to choose a good led lamp without consulting such catalog. Lamps packaging often lies about actual specs, lamps with the same packaging but manufactured in different years might have different quality etc
The issue is that LED bulbs aren’t simple devices like incandescent bulbs. LED bulbs have an electronic power supply inside which drives the LEDs at a constant current.
Power supply design is a major subfield of electronics engineering and there are all kinds of tradeoffs you can make to optimize for different goals. Consumer electronics almost always optimizes for cost, to the detriment of all else.
It is possible (and not very difficult) to design LED bulbs that will practically outlive their owners [1]. The problem is that it requires putting more LEDs in the bulb and driving them at lower current. This makes the bulb cost more and the only benefit is longer life. For a manufacturer, there are nothing but downsides to this approach.
It is also possible (and not very difficult) to design incandescent bulbs that will outlive their owners. In fact, the first mass produced light bulbs generally lasted 2,500+ hours. In the 1920s, the major bulb manufacturers formed the 'Pheobus Cartel' in Geneva and secretly colluded to limit the lifespan of bulbs to 1,000 hours to boost sales [1]. Another example of planned obsolescence harming consumers and the environment.
[1]https://interestingengineering.com/science/everlasting-light...
Not all of them! I was very surprised to open up my generic outdoor patio LED bulbs and find two strips of LED filament wired directly to power.
AFAICT it’s just enough LEDs in serial for 120VAC at 60 Hz to be “good enough” that they survive for “long enough”.
Of course they won't be as efficient, and output very little light, but they will last forever. (also, no white, but hey, win some lose some!)
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.
- Efficiency >= 45 lumens per watt
- CRI >= 90
- R9 Color Rendering value >= 50
- Rated life >= 15000 hours
- Minimum dimming level <= 10%
- Flicker <= 30%
Theoretically if a bulb is listed as JA8 compliant (and the certification isn't fake) you know it at least meets these thresholds.
And what do you do when the lightbulb burns out after only 3 years? The product has long since changed SKU, the manufacturer gets to claim they fixed any deficiencies (and it'll take years to find out if they are telling the truth), and you long since lost any proof of purchase.
This one was a little tricky for me when I was buying bulbs last year. I prefer warm-colored bulbs, and I was kind of confused why Amazon kept on saying it was refusing to ship bulbs to me. It took me a while before I realized it was because I'm in CA and the CRI was too low, and Amazon didn't have a way to just filter by CRI. Eventually my wife just ended up finding some warm-ish LED bulbs at a local store.
Like any informed consumer you must read every retail-based HN comment thread ;-]
6 of them have failed in less than 9 months, either flickering so badly it could cause an epileptic seizure or just straight up dying on me.
It's maddening.
PITA I know.
Consumer Reports tests a lot of consumer goods and used to be my go to for testing. They don’t take ad revenue so that helps. Though you have to be a member to see their reviews.
https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/about-us/what-we-do/inde...
They used to be the go to for car reliability info (when your car was rated high you sold more, according to my dad who was in the car business)
There is simple heuristic - all LED bulbs are bad. They generally have insufficient heatsink and unreplaceable PSU immediately next to LEDs.
Better are LED tubes (with T12 interface, as a replacement for fluorescent tubes), they have much more area for cooling and for PSU, and sometimes have replaceable PSU. Similarly lighting units with integrated LEDs.
At the end of the day, the author recommends giving filament-style LED bulbs a try, where the emitter is built onto a thin filament away from the circuit housing so it's far away from the heat.
A scale that can measure grams is like $10.
That's the million-dollar question of the '10s and '20s (and likely beyond), and is far bigger than just bulbs.
The only solution that I can think of that could work is a distributed rating system with a built-in web of trust. It theoretically shouldn't be that difficult for people to adopt, if only they got collectively fed up with the universe of crap we have now, and someone provided a nice app and protocol to federate information with.
(direct regulation of quality, vendor-controlled ratings, and browsing Reddit/HN comment threads are all fatally flawed non-solutions)
On the other hand, Daniel Kahneman was awarded a Nobel prize in 2002 for researching with Amos Tversky on how we make decisions, and how having more options makes our eventual decision less fulfilling as we suspect that we probably did not make the optimal decision. However, done is better than perfect. At least that's what some people say.
Given that we have multiple technology purchases to make, all of which will involve "research" and making decisions it is very frustrating, to me, that we do not have more reliable trustworthy guidance. There are competent review organizations and websites but they more frequently tend to be owned by product manufacturers and funded by advertisers. We know that marketing tries to create desire in our primitive consumer brains.
And as individuals with deep and long experience in at least one or more areas, we have our own biases that help us make decisions. And if we think carefully about how we gained this expertise, we should conclude that a lot of wasted time and mistakes were involved.
And we know that becoming an expert in lighting, spectral, power consumption, lifetime, CRI, etc could take a long time and there would be more to learn as the engineers create new solutions (blue LED plus yellow phosphor, or RGB LEDs, COB or something else...).
So to answer your question. You won't know that brand X produces quality bulbs that last a long time until you purchase and test them. Assume that they won't last a long time, don't buy the most expensive option, there will be improvements in LEDs and bulbs that will make your next purchase even better.
To sift past the marketing to get actual quality, well we do have some well known brands that distribute through well known stores. Buying from Alibaba or the dollar store is not going to result in the best outcome, but it might. Put those options aside as an experiment rather a "must make me happy now" experience.
How do you know that a product won't slip in quality over time? Well you won't know until you make that purchase. This happens all of the time with everything from salt ("Himalayan" salt with rocks, sea salt with microplastics, honey adulterated with sugar, olive oil with other oils)...
We live in a very interesting time, we no longer have to "follow the herd" or "hunt for the roots" in new locations. We're mostly protected from weather, earthquakes, famine, etc (exception occur). Our health generally good. There is however dog poop on the sidewalk and pot holes in the roads.
So when the grocery store moves your familiar product to another aisle, or changes their product line up, or increases the price, these are all opportunities to step out of "cruise control" and experience the uncertainty that comes with a constantly changing world.
"Marriage has no guarantees. If that's what you're looking for, go live with a car battery." - Erma Bombeck
Up to 70 years ago, item X had an extremely low complexity, and up to some 30 years ago, supplier Y had reliably constant quality between its products.
No previous generation had to deal with the problem we currently have.
- Does not overdrive the LEDs and Does not run power supply components at the limit of what they can. (Thus good longevity)
- Has a current based driver, so that slight voltage shifts from an appliance kicking on don't result in an obvious brightness shift.
- Suitable for use in recessed lighting or enclosed fixtures. (For better or worse, can lights and enclosed fixtures are still relatively common.)
- Makes bulbs in most common shapes like A19, chandelier, and PAR/BR shapes (for recessed lighting fixtures)
- Dimmable (And yes, I am quite well aware that being in conjunction with a current source driver is more complicated, but it is still possible). I'm not even particularly big on dimming, but I am big on smart switches, and many of those include dimming capabilities, and I don't want to worry about which bulbs I put where.
- Good color rendering index (and other similar features)
Even the linked companies products don't meet the full list. Their only dimmable A-series bulbs are the filament bulbs, which are not suitable for all use cases. Similarly, non of the non-filament bulbs in the A series shapes are marked as suitable for use in an enclosure.
It's possible to get power supplies to support multiple bulbs daisy chained, so you can invest in one decent power supply.
For general bulbs (e.g. chandelier tulip bulbs) i've found it to be really hard to find stuff that works reliably. 'Normal' round bulbs seem to be more reliable for some reason.
As evidence, notice that Philips refuses to sell the Dubai lamp outside Dubai. They are designed for truly long lifetimes, and nobody at Philips want's that.
What fraction of Microsoft Windows engineering goes into the complexity of picking and combining the feature sets of Windows Starter, Home Basic, Home Premium, Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate? It isn't 0.
Engineering that is negative for user-value is routine in big business. It's a big part of what MBAs are for. It is such a counter-intuitive thing to do that it requires special training.
I pay them and they do the research. A very logical business model.
https://www.which.co.uk/reviews/light-bulbs/article/how-to-b...
(Both will be irrelevant for Americans, I have never noticed a multi-voltage bulb.)
Besides, I don't control the lighting decisions of every place I go that's not my own home. And many people might be impacted in tiny ways without even noticing (cf. the old research about fluorescent lighting in schools/offices impacting mood or concentration or whatever).
I had to drive all over town to find a specialty lighting store with some 'real' Sylvania brand. (But then found the supermarket across the street has Philips on the shelf. Oof.)
Most people don’t want to pay the premium and don’t value the benefits that come with that premium.
This is also called boiling the frog. People actually do care, but in the scheme of things, they'll accept it.
The default lightbulb in the store 20 years ago had a tender warm light. The default lightbulb in the store today has garish light, or doesn't dim, or has that ugly plastic half cover. A real decline in quality of life. but sure, we can be dismissive about it, of course you can spend hours on the internet figuring it out (ignoring the fact that it took no effort whatsoever to get nice lighting before).
This is such a lie - no, you can't do the research. There are no reseatch papers conparing consumer products
Doing the research means buying everything avaliable on the market and testing it yourself.
Googling is not research, its choosing which SEO'd fraudulent article will lie to you today.
Quality is going to shit, because there is no way to twll apart which item is qualify. The market is failing.
That said, even if that's generously 100 million people that's a drop in the bucket compared to the rest of the population of consumers that couldn't care less.
I did find these tables from Budget Light Forums handy for shopping, however the fact that you have to use these I think only reinforces the point of the article:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/12jj1A6PNjHmWbFNu0FSi...
edit I learned a bit from a marketing blog article; CRI measures reflection of 8 spot colors but it leaves out some important parts of the spectrum, particularly deep red. https://www.waveformlighting.com/tech/what-is-cri-color-rend...
Maybe I should just give up and install a bunch of these "sun tunnels" in my house.
But yeah, explaining to normal folks that they need $30-$60 lightbulbs for every fixture in their home is basically a non-starter, but for me, I use this lamp every day and it should last a decade or more, so the value prop isn't bad, especially compared to spending $500 or so on something like a Humanscale "nice" desk lamp, which technically has much worse CRI and much lower output.
We recently built our home and went with WAC recessed lighting in all the main areas, which was about a $15k premium over just using what the contractor wanted to use, involved a lighting design company (that was also purchased the fixtures from), and took a dozen+ hours of our time and input, but I think it was worth it in the grand scheme of how much we spent. I personally can't stand hanging out at peoples houses where they have mismatched lights or just very poor lighting; it kills any interior design niceties and makes you really realize how much lighting affects the general feeling of indoor spaces.
The hardware stores near me, both big and small, stock only a single brand of bulb, as if they have some kind of exclusive deal.
Some of the bulbs have exact CRI listed, and some have "90+". I only buy the first kind.
Lately I've been using the GE Reveal/Relax. They were better than the contractor grade bulbs that came with the house but still just... wasn't there.
If you know any other manufacturers like this I'd greatly appreciate it if you could provide their links.
GE Filled With Sun, Philips Ultra HD (available on Amazon, but from Canada), and some other Chinese brands are currently top of the chart for CRI 95+, RA 90+ bulbs
Budgetlightforum.com
I read the site and ... Now all my flashlights MUST run open source firmware.
Buy a flashlight with the Anduril UI and you will understand. (search on amazon)
With my flashlights:
- press and hold the power button to ramp up brightness from zero
- press and hold again to ram down brightness
- click twice to get the maximum brightness from the light (mostly)
there are lots of other modes available, designed to be harder to stumble into, plus customizations you can add.
Also, the good flashlights have an always-on dim green LED that lets you find the flashlight during a power outage.
http://www.seoulsemicon.com/en/technology/sunlike/casestudy/
Because the big box stores (Walmart, Home Depot or whatever) don't carry expensive stuff with Cree LEDs and solid cooling designs. They carry whatever shit they can get their hands on for as cheap as possible.
And most consumers don't know better, the 1% of consumers that does know orders from Amazon and prays for not getting ripped off by counterfeiters.
It is a clear ripoff.
I thought full spectrum LEDs are future tech because I haven't seen one.
16 incandescent bulbs, averaging 3 hours per day, would cost about 50 cents per day. $150-$250 per year in most of the country.
So getting the really premium LEDs is still cheaper than lighting used to be. Even better if you use the good bulbs for room lighting and the cheap bulbs for closets and outdoors and such.
$200 Canadian (including shipping) for 6 bulbs is stopping me. $33 / bulb with no guarantee how long they will last.
$18 USD for a single 10 Watt bulb? I don't care how expensive electricity is, the $2 incandescent bulb is a better value.