This.
Such articles remind me of the vinyl-vs-CD arguments in which a barely perceptible difference is ridiculously inflated.
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If you’re sensitive to light, then it’s huge. If you’re an artist who at all cares about the color tone in their house… then… yeah it’s a huge difference. I hate them. They make my skin crawl.
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This bad advice makes me question the whole article. Color filters like this don’t magically transform light to different wavelengths. They just absorb light outside of those wavelegths. So putting an amber filter on a blue-white bulb doesn’t create or shift the output to a warmer wavelength, it just blocks the cooler wavelengths. And the filter heats up in the process.
This bugged me, too. Green-blue LEDs are freaking powerful. At my old job, we needed a specific wavelength light for a reactor. A single high-end blue-green LED with proper cooling and power control was so bright that light leaking around the gaps between the door and wall of the lab overcame the lights in the next room over. With no direct line-of-sight to the light emitter, the neighboring room looked underwater.
Also, that wavelength just on the blue side of green is the light humans perceive best. So it’s the color that needs the least power to be seen by us.
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I think the main problem is with overdriven LEDs rather than the regulators, efficiency goes down and more power is transformed in heat rather than light.
This cooks themselves and the regulator to death.
I’ve had only one LED bulb fail me in some years, and the regulator was old style, not one of the modern linear constant current ones.
All the LEDs were fine, just the regulator failed.
I mean, artists can be unnerving and sometimes creepy, but to the point of hating them…
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Maybe Big Amber Nail Polish is behind the whole article.
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More like the article was written by someone with no background in science or engineering and they think they can replace physics with bullshit and no one will notice.
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I don’t understand why you’re all griping about using a yellow filter (amber nail polish) to make a blue/yellow LED appear to be less blue. Seems like a good way to do it!
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Maybe spray paint would allow for an even application, but nail polish? it would probably look splotchy and cracked.
What the hell is this nonsense.
It’s not challenging to find high-CRI bulbs that are high-CRI! Lots of people have tested the “cheap” high-CRI bulbs for accuracy, including Wirecutter/New York Times: The 3 Best LED Light Bulbs of 2023 | Reviews by Wirecutter
we asked the Lighting Design Alliance’s Geoff Goral for help. Wirecutter editor Tim Barribeau brought 21 bulbs to Long Beach, California, where Goral measured and compared each bulb for color accuracy, dimmability, and relative brightness levels. Goral used an illuminance meter, to measure how much light emanated from a bulb onto a surface, and a spectrometer, to read the spectrum of light from each bulb, to see how much light was in each wavelength and measure color values R1-15.
The brands they recommend are not expensive and available nearly everywhere. Like, just find a reputable review source that actually did these tests and pick their bulbs to buy?
The one place you probably do need to think about this a bit more is new construction. Nowadays most homes don’t have bulbs at all, they have what look like recessed lighting that’s actually just some LEDs designed to look that way. You need to find a vendor for those with CRI values you trust there.
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Same. I chose them all in a warm spectrum and have no complaints.
I also don’t use very bright ones except for the overhead/can lights - but they are on dimmers turned way down other than in the kitchen.
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Yeah, I’m just really confused by the sudden appearance of all this LED hate. I’ve got almost all LED lights in my house and love them. Massive knock down on my electric bills, and many of them have warm yellow glows and I don’t recall them being more expensive in any way. The only expensive one I have is made to look like an old Edison style bulb, which is kind of cool.
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This is why I hate blue LEDs so much. I’ve got several electronic devices in my room that use blue LEDs to indicate standby mode (some of them flashing), and with the lights out in the room they’re bright enough to read by, and a nuisance when I’m trying to sleep. I’ve taken to covering them up with masking tape, and even then it takes a few layers. Never had this problem with red or amber LEDs.
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There’s something to be said about the more expensive LED bulbs. I bought a set of Hue bulbs over ten years ago. They all are still working, even the one that I dropped and broke the glass on.
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I was surprised that this wasn’t copy for a BoingBoingStore advert.
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There’s nothing wrong with those. It’s when people do crappy aftermarket retrofits that end up doing little more than blinding other drivers rather than lighting the soundings.
In the US automotive lighting regulations are really archaic and make it impossible for manufacturers to add things like laser lighting and other innovations you can find in the same cars in other countries. It also means headlights are highly regulated.
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I suspect consumers have voted with their wallets, which is why we have super-budget airlines, and why the more common LED bulbs are often just as bad as low-cost fluorescent bulbs.
You can still get high CRI from bulbs from reputable brands, but you’re fighting the economies of scale that has optimized for what people buy.
Vinyl falls far short of the capabilities of the compact disc format, but if you’re comparing a master mixed to compensate for the limitations of vinyl and which was just duplicated to CD, then the CD will probably sound similar or worse. Older CDs with vinyl mixes sound awful compared to new or remastered content, I have a few CDs that it seems they didn’t bother to remove the RIAA equalization curve before sending it for manufacture. So I can understand how there might be a perception of no difference, depending on how the content was processed.
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Guessing the writer of this article got some super cheapo LEDs off drop-ship Amazon and is unhappy.
Assuming you get a real brand, or at least one that has verifiable product, you get decent bulbs. Yes, that means you won’t get the absolute cheapest but they’re not all that expensive these days anyway. I put some more expensive, higher quality ones in my home office and the difference between them and the cheapos I tried first was literally night and day. Cost was, at most, 1.5x, but they’ll last until I move in 10 years most likely.
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Also, that wavelength just on the blue side of green is the light humans perceive best. So it’s the color that needs the least power to be seen by us.
This ^^^
Although it turns out human color vision might be much more complex and diverse, of course.
Seems like a reasonable thing to use the most efficient wavelength for cheap lighting. That’s what we did with broadcast TV to save bandwidth. Just called GREEN / LUMEN and we were good.
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ah, the strategist returns to its bread and butter–selling cosmetics,
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