No, the lightbulbs at home depot are inexpensive and they work fine. On the other hand, if you care about CRI, then you can also google for high-quality bulbs with a good CRI. I don't really see a problem here?

The problem is I used to be able to spend a couple dollars on lightbulbs that consistently looked great and didn’t require a ton of research or money. I’ve bought hundreds and hundreds of dollars worth of high-end LED lightbulbs since moving into my new place last year, and the lighting here still looks like crap. Even with budget it’s hard to get something that looks good. Finding something that dims without flickering, the issue with dimming not actually warming like mentioned in the article, trying to match color temperatures to actually look good, so many issues. I’ve tried to splurge and get good lights and good dimmers but I’m still not happy with how it’s turned out. And if you go in any home or restaurant where they haven’t dedicated substantial time and money into good lighting, things are downright painful these days. I desperately miss incandescent bulbs. I’ve been told by several people that I seem oddly sensitive to this, but it’s a huge deal as far as I’m concerned.

Check out WAC lighting. You'll pay for the quality, but it's there. Work with a local lighting store to guarantee results. There are other high-end brands too, but WAC are very popular and what many high-end hotels and restaurants use.

Thats the kind of fixtures you find in the homes of people who got their wealth by robbing the poor.

I searched for "A19" since thats the kind of bulb type that a regular old joe like me has. Just one match and its only 80 CRI. Thats not anywhere competitive with what else has been suggested in this thread.

The problem is that previously the low-effort default option was great, and now the low-effort default option is bad and to get the equivalent of the previous great default you must now spend a bunch of extra time and money. "Caring about CRI" is basically just caring about the human visual system working correctly, that shouldn't be some weird niche.

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).

> previously the low-effort default option was great

You mean incandescents? I disagree, their efficiency is terrible ("space heaters that happen to glow"). And their lifespan was artificially limited.

Fair enough. But at least the light was good.

Not in my experience. It's always a crapshoot.

I bought Feit lightbulbs at a big box home store (not the cheapest option). Half of the 6 I bought failed in 6 months. The rest seem to be going strong at least…

You could ask that question about every consumer product since the 90s.

If you want nice things that engineers spent thousands of hours researching, designing, and tuning, you can do the research to find those brands and pay extra for them.

Most people don’t want to pay the premium and don’t value the benefits that come with that premium.

> 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).

Reddit's /r/buyitforlife 's 1.4 million subscribers and probably 10x as many people that visit without joining reddit and the subsequent similar population of people scraping that data and consuming the scraped data... I think they would disagree with you.

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.

> you can do the research to find those brands and pay extra for them

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.

I mean… just here in this comment section are suggestions for suppliers of premium LEDs that I would trust based on the karma rating of the people who posted the links.

Googling for “premium LED high ratings 95 cri” or searching on Amazon definitely isn’t going to work, because they will just send you to the highest bidder, or the most proficient scammer.

The comment section is great , but if I need to find out quality of a random consumer product, what is the chance I will find it in this comment section? like 1%?

You go where the people who might know better talk about these things!

AV forums for picking a TV or projector, cooking forums for picking a knife set, and HN, you know, for picking the contrast level of your <body> text.

For most of my purchases, I cannot find any trustworthy content at all. This experience is shared by 90% of people I talk to

I feel like I’ve been able to make decently informed choices without too much hassle…

Recent purchases include usb cables, rechargeable batteries & USB power pack, LCD monitor, SSDs, multivitamins, torque wrench, belt sander, pressure washer, washing machine, gluten-free pastas and baking mixes, video games…

LED bulbs are kind of a pathological case, along with things like USB cables, speaker wire... If you want something better than the lowest common denominator it’s very hard because they are nearly indistinguishable from the outside and take a long time to fail.

But for example shopping and comparing washing machines online wasn’t terrible. You can narrow down the list very easily based on your requirements and budget, probably you end up with 2 choices that both seem great, you can watch videos of them running, and then you pick the one assembled in your home country or the one that makes a more pleasant ding when it turns on, and call it a day? Obviously the “reviews” are all fake, but the point isn’t for someone to tell you what to buy, but that all the options are readily discoverable while I’m lying in bed on my phone.

THD by me doesn't even stock the CREE bulbs anymore, just the crappy FEIT generics.

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.)

This is the tragedy of modern times in the West. Hard to get anything quality without tons of research. Not even about the money, there's just too much noise

Well, I guess you'll have to leave the West since everything is just so awful here. Heaven forbid that the highest quality lightbulbs aren't sold on every street corner.

Yeah, just paying £2000 fot an item does not mean you got anything quality - 90% chance you got scammed

Yes, exactly. It’s one thing to need to be an expert to find a diamond in the rough. It’s another to not be able to guarantee you’ll get a premium product by going to a reputable retailer and picking out an expensive whatever. That’s the really frustrating part.

I think the issue is that there are no more reputable retailers. Just amazon, which more than half the time isn’t even amazon.

> This is the tragedy of modern times in the West.

What does "in the West" mean here? Is the situation better outside "the West"? Is this really a modern "tragedy"? Caveat Emptor is not a new saying.

If you speak German there's always Stiftung Warentest: https://www.test.de/Lampen-im-Test-4436814-0/

I pay them and they do the research. A very logical business model.

Which? magazine is an equivalent in Britain.

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.)

Which are great but they don't actually have any light bulb reviews, just advice.