Hang on - are you telling me that companies aren’t trying to make the best possible products at the best possible prices, regardless of profit?
Whoa, I need to sit down. Getting dizzy…
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There’s a lot of cheaply made LED lights out there. They often have crappy driver circuitry and poor cooling. This means that typically the LED lights are fine but the underlying electronics dies out pretty quickly usually due to overheating. Of course there’s also plenty of cases where fewer LEDs are driven extra hard to save costs while being brighter. These cheap lights can also be fire or shock hazards due to poor grounding or shielding.
I’ve had a fair share of poor-quality LED lights die on me over the years so I’m extremely skeptical of lighting with “too good to be true” pricing.
Don’t take my word for it, though. There’s plenty on YouTube from respected experts like Big Clive and Electroboom that back these claims with scientific analysis.
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I can’t stand that white blasting LED bulb color, however, for the most part, I’ve been pleased with the performance of LEDs I have had in my fixtures over the years.
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I’d be worried about the off-gassing, if the bulbs get warm enough. 
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LEDs produce light only at the very specific frequencies their junctions are able to emit; certain materials produce certain frequencies. Some are in the visible spectrum, some are above or below. But they only emit one color.
Phosphors are used to shift frequencies, transforming unwanted colors such as UV into the useful visible spectrum. They are fairly efficient, transforming perhaps 80-90% of the energy.
Each junction/phosphor combination emits only a very narrow slice of the spectrum. Making a certain temperature color involves combining different junctions and phosphors to blend to the desired hue. It’s an approximation, but is mostly good enough to fool the eye. But they may emit very little light in the frequency range of amber nail polish.
Filters don’t “convert” colors, they only remove colors by reflecting them or by absorbing other colors and converting them into heat. They’ll turn a 9W LED into the equivalent of 6W of light, emitting the remaining 3W as heat.
Heat is the enemy of semiconductors. Heat causes the junctions to destroy themselves. To fight this, LED bulbs are designed with heat sinks (blocks of thermally absorbent materials like aluminum) that carry the heat from the LEDs to fins that dissipate the heat by convection. To keep the costs manageable and to fit in existing fixtures, they are made with the barest minimum amount of mass needed to dissipate exactly the amount of heat produced by the junction. There is no capacity to shed any excess heat.
An unplanned filter traps excess heat in a system that is not designed for it, causing it to fail prematurely.
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Yes, I’m aware of all of that stuff. I’m an electrical engineer who has made a bunch of stuff using LEDs and CRTs with various phosphors. I also design spectrometers for a living.
The aluminum heat sink is in the neck of the LED bulb, not the globe. I just sawed a couple of these bulbs apart this morning to verify this fact. I would hope that the heat sink provides more of the cooling path than the globe does, unlike an incandescent bulb.
The amber nail polish will do a reasonable job of absorbing the blue spectral line from the LED, which is what the original article is recommending. Why would that be a problem? There are no yellow LEDs in an LED bulb, just a broadly-emitting yellow phosphor.
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all i know is that a lot of the newer luxury cars - including fing tesla - have headlights that burn holes into the back of my head. truly, it’s physically painful.
unlike other headlights they also take my eyes longer to adjust back to decent night time vision. i mostly bike so it’s only slightly terrifying how bad they make driving at night.
( sometimes there are other bicyclists with the super bright blue shifted lights as well. im assuming they don’t know how bad they suck for other people )
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“It’s not challenging to find high-CRI bulbs!” This is true if you know where to shop. We started looking for high CRI about 5 years ago as we planned a remodel. Things may be better now, but we couldn’t find CRI values stated on any bulbs sold at consumer-oriented places.
It was hard enough to find stated color temperature! (a different measurement)
We tested color temperature to see what we like. We stopped using all ceiling and built-in fixtures, and we now (until the remodel) use torchieres and other lamps with carefully-chosen LEDs. Now that there are consumer-oriented bulbs with changing color temp, that number is more likely to appear.
Result: we prefer 4500K – close to daylight without seeming blue. (We still use warmer, lower K bulbs in bedrooms and their hallway – but still high CRI!)
Y’know, artists and needleworkers etc used to pay a fortune for “daylight lamps” – which are 5000K (like the sky!)
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Even some of the stock ones (looking at you, Lexus) don’t do a good job of leveling when going over rises and thus still blind oncoming drivers.
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Easier than installing light pipes with those cold mirror sides, tho!?
Pretty sure HID headlamps are adjustable and that someone’s real good at dialing it back from hitting 100% to 95% so far. Also that the 200W-equiv. lamps I got and put on dimmers sneak up to 80%…not the 7W bulb dystopia I was promised, but it dials back some. Except that first failure that switched off sort of organically in about an hour and stayed until power cycled.
Art positive, I am not so butthurt as to replace the ceiling with vinyl cutting wraps of erstwhile/actual metal ceiling patterns and transfect my city council with gfp and the new red fluorescent proteins tagged for reasonable parts, much less look into the new contractile vector bacteria (they live, they think they’re little needles and syringes that move their business into formerly just caterpillar cells,) to do it. What would an honest prolific do? Nothing like completism with nail polish I think.
Duketrout, it’s a single blue-green LED, what can it cost? [Laughs in undead pirate revenge for valleys.] Maybe Cree Xsomething don’t count and Prizmatix.com (1W) do?
Gatto> …sometimes there are other cyclists…
If it looks like they have an opaque helmet with the trail isoelevations map on a virtual display…perhaps they also run a restaurant in which all photos look either underexposed because a similar cyclist is passing the large windows, or orange-backlit because the warmer table lights come up like that. Listen for the kitchen to sometimes shout “Behind” “Over!” “Underdark!” “Gothic Present!” Fun rote.
Also, maybe reflectors at 3’ everywhere on signposts to fix? 4’ ?
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I’m can’t tell if the Lightbulb Outrage lobby wants me to demand more blue light or less blue light
If we want the same color we used to get from incandescents, we can buy that
If we want high-intensity “daylight” instead, but still using less than 20 watts, that’s a thing we can have now that wasn’t available before
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do you know what a cartel is, Johnny?
some of the plot of Gilda (1946) involved a tungsten cartel, had no idea there actually was one
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All of this. People buy shitty bulbs and get shitty results. So?
I buy the slightly more expensive Phillips bulbs and they last forever and make great light.
People say they want quality, but when given the choice always choose to buy cheap shit and then complain about it.
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I’m not sure that’s really a fault of HIDs versus just modern projector beams which are more focused. Auto leveling isn’t instantaneous either.
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Some are better than others, though. And a laggy leveling system is problematic when the light is that intense.
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… or, maybe, lighting our houses is a solved problem and the cheap stuff works fine
It’s like the lightbulb equivalent of audiophile woo
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Well, we had it when candles were being replaced by gas, we had it when gas was being replaced by electric lightbulbs, we had it when filament bulbs were being replaced by CFLs, so why wouldn’t we have it when our beloved CFLs are being replaced LEDs?
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I agree with all of the above except for the “beloved CFLs” part.
I despised those things with a passion when they first came out and the improvements made only improved that to a strong dislike.
LEDs have problems. All mentioned above. One of my ceiling fans has a proprietary LED module with visible PWM and I’ll never get used to it, only resign myself to it.
But it still beats CFLs by miles.
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That was sarcasm. I know so many people who still insist they are worse than the old filament bulbs.
But now that they are on the way out, I note that people are claiming exactly the same things about the superiority of CFLs over LEDs.
Personally, I can’t see it so 
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Some of the earlier ones I bought from Costco came in a box of 12. Out of the box, 6 worked, 3 were totally dead, and 3 were half-brightness. Last time I checked they were still selling the same brand.
I have about 7 or 8 failed Noma bulbs waiting to be returned to Canadian Tire—still under warranty but they failed after 2 or 3 years of use.
Now when they fail I replace with Philips and they have been consistently good. I can’t recall any of them failing.
I’m one of the lucky ones who can’t detect these subtle differences. The last few incandescent bulbs I bought, however, were noticeably inconsistent in brightness and colour.
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