If you told me you could make one room of my house consistently color-balanced with LED lighting that I would have no reason to hate, I would ball up a couple hundred dollar bills and throw them at you.

(Edit: I’m also coming from buying Philips Hue bulbs for precisely this reason, so I’m fairness, it’s not as big a price jump.)

I have a few Hues and they are great, and last much longer. But in this house I cannot justify even that. In my kitchen/breakfast nook alone I have 10 lightbulbs plus an overhead flushmount.

Keep in mind: all LEDs leak blue light even the warm ones (color is achieved by average so you can have high red and high blue and it looks balanced visually). These bright blue leaking LEDs are great during the day — especially those with high CRI and R9 values. But not at night when you’re trying to go to bed! Switch to incandescent only in the evenings until they figure out blue-less dimmable LEDs

Not all, only white LEDs. You can use any cheap LED RGB strip without white components and set it to yellow/orange light with blue completely off. It has poor CRI though.

Obviously it has bad CRI because that requires a blue component :)

But for going to sleep it's not a bad idea.

Not only that. It also completely skips amber part of spectrum, making human skin look bit weird.

incandescent bulbs used to cost like $0.60 each

Ain’t nobody gonna get rich selling bulbs for $.60 that aren’t even filled with mercury and rare earths.

Makes me think of this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1X-ZVOYwNLU

> ball up a couple hundred dollar bills and throw them at you

this is why more and more businesses only accept cards. :-P

I can’t imagine sitting in a room with the color temperature of a gas station bathroom with random flickering and fading out every couple of years.

I have those HD bulbs. They are nowhere near as bad as what you just described.

That’s the problem - sometimes they are great. They are more complex devices that use parts from random Chinese suppliers.

Incandescent bulbs were very simple. Cheap vs name brand. White vs soft white. 120v vs 130v. LEDs have at least 7 attributes, some of which are not documented well or at all.

Tell me what LED bulb is ideal to produce 1500 lumens of output in an outdoor semi-enclosed fixure? It will take about 10 minutes of googling around if you are in the know. The average consumer doesn’t have a chance.

In the 6 years I've been in my current house, having installed these everywhere in the house upon moving in (total around 80 bulbs), I've had less than ten to flicker or otherwise go bad. Maybe I'm just lucky.

I would prefer incandescents though. The only thing I don't miss about them is the heat. Everything else was superior.

They have several different warm LED's at Home Depot. You can generally find 2100K to 3000K. Sometimes even 1800K in the specialty bulbs there.

They're not terrible, but the low CRI keeps me coming back to halogen.

that doesnt really fix the flickering problem.

I had one room that had a flicker problem. Replaced the fixture (was going to do this anyway because The Wife Said So) and it went away. I guess that's why some of the complaints seem foreign to me.

A lot of people, including this article, blame flickering on bulbs. Usually because introducing an LED bulb is what shows the issue.

That the underlying issue might be the fixture, or in the older electrical system, is not always an intuitive jump.

And this is the exact reason that the market for good quality LEDs is so small. You care about price but not light quality (primarily CRI but also flicker and dimmability). That's fine, it's totally your decision to make. But the two products are incredibly far from equivalent.

I mean there’s gotta be some reasonable price limit where you stop blaming the consumer. If each supposedly higher-quality LED bulb is $50,000 are you still blaming the consumer? Especially when the consumer has can’t realistically even know if they’re going to get a higher quality bulb or just a $5 bulb resold for $50,000.

It’s only a few $ more.

And it says on the box.

I usually stick to the same brand too. All Phillips bulbs are 90+ CRI and some are 95+ so I just buy Phillips. Problem solved.

"A few dollars" is a bad way to describe the difference between $2 and $25.

I consider $3.75 for a Phillips 95+ CRI bulb a few dollars more.

A Home Depot bulb is like $2.75.

I hate that you have to research bulbs but you’re making it out way harder than it is.

But those $3-4 bulbs aren't the ones people were talking about.

Unless you claim they are the same tier as the waveform bulbs?

They’re really good and far better than most bulbs.

Waveforms are even better but it’s like springing for the luxury item.

But unless you’re someone that could readily tell, it’s not with the price difference.

I have a few Hue Iris that I love for mood lightning, surprisingly the CRI is supposedly very bad according to https://www.archyde.com/philips-hue-iris-test-a-designer-and...

I hear you, but I bought two waveforms just to try them out, and they're absolutely incredible. It's a shockingly better light than the $2 home depot light. It's the equivalent of going from an underpowered computer to one that's up to the job - you don't really notice how bad the old one was until you get something up to the task.

I bought many of the Home Depot private label LEDs...and had to replace every single one of them. Outright failure, buzzing, flickering. They're just terrible. I've replaced them with Philips.