Philips dimmable LED bulb for $5

5000K light makes me feel like I’m sitting under an arc welder.

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snort

Two points have been awarded to house daneel.

Again, if you’re happy with it then I’m happy too.

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So, you are happy with my serpent? (Drops mic, boards leer jet). I’ll see you in questions good sir!!

It looks great in my house, so yes.

We’ve discussed it a lot around the office, Europeans also don’t care about glare as much and don’t seem to mind not having grates or less control over their light. It’s just something they’ve gotten used to and it’s their standard.

Perceived brightness actually has more to do with the light levels on vertical surfaces instead of the color temperature. Especially as the eye stops noticing it after about five minutes if it’s consistent. Stop in at a James Turrell exhibit or leave on colored ski goggles sometime, you’ll start to see red as white and get all confused when you shift to the other galleries or take them off. But if you aim the light at your walls to punch them up without changing light levels at your desk you will think it’s brighter when nothing has actually changed.

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CSB: this one time my wife and I went to an art theater and saw a vintage… Risque… Movie in old school three d. My eyes flickered colors back and forth for almost two hours after I took the glasses off.

Could this be solved using a RGB lamp and modifying the color profile?
Another option is combining a white LED with a red one. I think I saw such things at some LED vendor…

Um, ah, uh…

Suppose your light source has a narrower-than-sunlight range of spectrum, say a red light. The white/near-white areas will appear white/reddish, the red areas will appear red/whiteish. The cyan and the black surfaces will appear dark/black and everything else will appear dark. Likewise for green-only and blue-only light sources.

Photographers abandoned red safe-lights in darkroom more than fifty years ago for this very reason; they make the darkroom look, um, very dark (and anyways, your eyes aren’t very sensitive to red light.). Hollywood, of course, begs to differ.

If the artificial lighting doesn’t put out any blue light, then all the blues in your furniture, your paintings, your clothes look black or very dark. In addition, some of the chemicals in the fabrics fluoresce in the presence of blue light, making the whites appear to be (or actually be) brighter. Even dark, brown woods reveal their grain better, and don’t seem so monotone black. The room appears brighter. Am I wrong?

You’re talking about a very limited color spectrum that prevents illuminating certain colors. But people perceive brightness in the vertical surfaces.

This desk is lit to the same footcandle level in both cases. In fact, the source even puts out the same lumens and is in the same position. But in the example on the right the room appears brighter because the wall is lit more evenly. The actual brightness of the task area is the same but the vertical wall is the key to perceived brightness.

In your example of limited spectrum you’re saying a room is brighter when you paint the walls white instead of a dark blue, but the point is the same, it’s the vertical surfaces that make a space “feel” brighter.

In this Turrell, which surface is brighter?

The answer is that the yellow feels brighter. But if you were to be in the space for long enough your eye would start to perceive the yellow plane as white. The same way staring at this:

results in a correctly colored American flag when you then look at a white wall. Your eye got fatigued at these colors and overcorrected when you looked at something that was actually white. Your color balance shifts to find a white in any environment and you stop noticing color temperature when everything is consistent.

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Last week I bought a dozen of the flat phillips that are the subject of this post.

They’re on sale everywhere, salesperson told me Phillips is changing the packaging & wants the current stock gone.

$7.50 Canadian, but Ontario provides $5 off coupons if you buy LED which can be applied even to sale items, piles of them right next to the bulbs.

So mine were $2.50 Canadian, which is like 50 cents US these days,or it feeld like it

Missed this one. There are theatrical fixtures that have a red chip in there and software that brings the red up as the white dims down to automatically recreate the red shift when down on dimmer. It looks really good.

They, of course, cost about two grand apiece, are two feet long and painted matte black.

Nothing in terms of architectural lighting downlights yet, but I also wouldn’t hold my breath for that market to want to do such a thing.

Arduino (or any ATmega class chip), and roll them out on kickstarter? The PWM regulation is a pretty easy thing to do, and some circuitboard vendors are even able to make the boards on aluminium substrate which is ideal for high cooling needs.

Ideally, we could use three PWM channels - white, green (or amber/yellow), and red. That’d give the entire range of red to bright white. If blue is added, we’d have tunable light color even to a bright daylight. The white LEDs would provide the bulk of the brightness, the others would just “flavor” the light or contribute significantly at low brightness levels.

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I support the idea, but only because I see it as a problem. Most clients just want to see Off, 50%, Full. They don’t care about redshift because they didn’t notice it in the first place and wouldn’t understand why you’d spend money to solve something they don’t perceive as a problem.

The second issue is one of compatibility. Are these retrofit downlight modules or designed to go into medium base sockets? If the former, then we need to determine whose fixtures they’ll be compatible with, as a 4" trim isn’t always 4". Edison Price makes a 4 1/8", Lightolier makes a 4 1/2" and Kurt Versen does a 4 3/4". And if it’s designed as a retrofit, everyone’s going to ask why we’re reinventing the wheel since the Hue is out there and relatively inexpensive.

Thirdly, controls. People have the Hue. The pull out their smartphone, call up the app and the thing doesn’t work. The lamp didn’t get the signal, the wireless didn’t connect, the fact you need to pull out your phone to deal with your lighting is already a pain. But with three PWM channels you can’t get away with a standard wall dimmer, you need to reach into the realm of an intelligent wall controller, and people are going to shrug it off as too complex. Again, I have trouble getting people to even use the 50% setting on their quarter-million dollar system. They want me to set levels in the space and they want to press one button on the wall that toggles this state on and off.

There’s totally a market out there for this right now. Unfortunately it’s typically the kind of people who are just as content to make it themselves with their own Arduino, as they’ve had to cobble together their smart home with custom bits already.

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Oh, hey everyone, dim those lights for a few minutes today in honor of ol’ Joe. Hell of a guy.

Should we put our lights at half-brightness?

I’m a firm believer in the Broadway marquee standard. Down for one minute at 8:00 and then back up.

There is in fact an LED bulb that has an extra red LED added to it, which becomes brighter as the rest of the bulb is dimmed. It’s the Philips “Warm Glow”. I’ve tried it and it is lovely, very reminiscent of an incandescent light, but, I avoid using dimmers with LEDs since results are so unpredictable.

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Follow the directions. They took the unpredictability out of it for you:

For example, you need to use leading edge dimmers with those lamps.

Directions… sure. But is the strobe-light effect that occurs under a dimmed LED light a defect or is it something we’re supposed to accept as the new normal? I installed some LED tape with an LED dimmer, and when dimmed the result was when my dog wagged its tail it looked like a series of still pictures. Unacceptable.

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