I wonder if there's room to at least engage with the neighbor to talk about friendlier light options? You might also be able engage with these folks to see if there are efforts to improve the lighting in new York: https://darksky.org/
You could probably still reduce the flicker by either increasing the switching frequency or putting some kind of filter network between the switch and the load.
But I've also never lived in a house that has dimmers (they've all been old homes in the north eastern US) and I never use overhead lighting, so it's not something I need or would miss.
I googled for G4 LED tube PWM and got products that say they are G4 LED tubes that use PWM.
Pretty sure 100% of LED products sold anywhere use PWM if you don't use them at full brightness. I sometimes walk around lightning stores with a slo mo camera and see PWM in every price bracket.
Actually that's not true, my first thought was "just use a layer of phosphor excited by the LEDs", but fluorescent tubes do that and people used to make the same complaints about flicker, so.
Looks like "flicker index" is a useful(?) search term, anyway.
Apparently Philips Hue uses 500-1000Hz. I wonder if there's manufacturers that use a much higher rate.
On an old iPhone with basic slow-mo recording capabilities, typical Hue bulbs don't "blink" when the video plays back, but the PWM-dimmed iPhone in the same video recording was blinking/flashing like crazy.
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Another example of the PWM details mattering: I can't use any iPhone with OLED (anything from the X to current), but I am able to use a Note9 which has OLED with DC-style PWM.
PWM at low duty cycles tends to be much more noticeable. But that’s where higher frequencies should solve the problem.
Some PWM implementations ramp the brightness up and down slightly (easier on eyes), while other manufacturers flip the switch on and off harshly (like strobing)
The shorter time the screen is dark between being lit up results in a a shorter pulse duration, and the pulse duration and depth are more important than the Hz
Obviously it costs more, but I wish manufacturers would just do it.
Similarly, I prefer a Class A amplifier if I have the space, but I won't open that can of worms here.
Medicine for depression, anxiety, insomnia...
it's nearly a closed loop; something i intuitively realized shortly after 2001/09/11 - by the end of that year i decided i would no longer have a "Television" attached to CATV/SAT/ANT service.
I'm not sure if i am correct, i haven't really dedicated a lot of time to getting the exact numbers, talking to psychologists and sociologists and the like. But two people i know had "breakdowns" (grippy sock) in the last month and both of them always have true crime on TV in the background or listen to true crime podcasts. Shortly after that happened i was listening to the moe facts podcast where Moe used the term "trauma based entertainment" and something clicked - Moe didn't mention "it's because of pharma ads" - that's my own input after having worked for the largest television "broadcast" company in the world, just long enough to see the advertiser "dinner".
> it's nearly a closed loop; something i intuitively realized shortly after 2001/09/11 - by the end of that year i decided i would no longer have a "Television" attached to CATV/SAT/ANT service.
Curiously this is about the same time I decided to give up on TV and radio as well.
Over 75 year olds are the largest FTA cohort.
[0] https://www.acma.gov.au/publications/2024-12/report/communic...
Movies are another one, and lots of people watch movies. If i go on hulu or netflix and start tallying the genres (either TBE or not-TBE), what do we figure it will be?
The person i heard use the phrase "Trauma Based Entertainment" used it to describe movies that "we were sat down to watch when we were 9-12." Unfortunately the podcast i mentioned isn't super-advanced on the backend so i am unsure how to share clips at this point. But i've heard before the claim "young women as a demographic listen to true crime" repeated as a truism. I know the women close to me listened to this sort of content in the past or currently. I'm not trying to generalize this to the entire cohort.
also i only think, myself, that it's harmful, TBE/true crime/etc; i'm not a sociologist or psychologist.
They are nice.
Also, you can buy high wattage lights, and the three ways have lower wattage settings.
Finally, outdoor and appliance incandescents lamps are very inefficient, but last forever.
How do the reds look to you?
I looked at the photometric reports from a couple Waveform models on their website and the R9 (saturated red rendering) was in the 90s for both with tint almost exactly on the blackbody line. The 2700K did have a bit worse R9 than the 4000K so I could imagine it doesn't look exactly like an incandescent.
I did at one point randomly put the LED in different configurations when I first got it and my wife was able to pick out which lamp had the LED in it every time. They just have a different feel, even if the temperature rating is around the same as the incandescent and the R9 was the highest of the LEDs I evaluated. At least these Waveform LEDs don't give me migraines though.
There are seven extended samples for CRI (R9-R15) not included in the average. LEDs often do particularly poorly on R9, a measure of saturated red rendering. LED sources with high R9 usually advertise it separately.
Tint, or blackbody deviation (Duv) is also important to the look of light and listed on the chart, but not for every model. These numbers are very small, but important: anything outside of +/s 0.006 is not white light according to ANSI. +0.006 looks very green, and -0.006 looks very pink. Interestingly, after acclimating for a few minutes, most people think very pink looks better and more natural than neutral white[0]. Most people do not like green tint.
[0] https://www.energystar.gov/sites/default/files/asset/documen...
What is this world coming to, that you have to buy some top-range lamps just to see the inside of your own home in true colour...
I have to pay 3x the price for a CRI>90 LED w.r.t. a CRI>80 one. At least the price difference brings better light quality regardless of CRI (soft start, dimmability, even less flicker, better light distribution). On the other hand, I'm happy that I can get halogen bulbs if I really want to.
The problem comes from losing past frames of reference. We say "we're at 99% of benefit parity with the previous generation", but this 1% losses compensate every generation, and now we live in a more efficient, but arguably less comfortable life.
A couple of Technology Connections (this guy is nuts when it comes to LEDs, in a good way) videos on the subject:
(Unfortunately, other people where I live like to turn on the light even in the day time and that bothers me.)
It'd provide you nice warm light, and will allow to flood the space with bright light if the need arises. Neither of them are expensive. Halogen bulbs are also CRI100, so their color rendering is not different from incandescent bulbs.
Turning on lights when you have ample sun is not a wise choice, I agree.
Average lifespan of an incandescent bulb is about 1,000 hours. For a typical 60 watt bulb, that means it burns 60 kWh in electricity over the course of it's life. At $0.20/kWh, that means an incandescent is going to cost you $12 in electricity over its lifetime.
A Philips Ulta-Definition 4-pack of 60W-equivalent is $11.53 on amazon today, or $2.88 / bulb. That $3 bulb is actually 8W. So over those same 1,000 hours, that's 8 kWh, or $1.6 in electricity costs. So the $3 bulb saves you $10 in lifetime electricity costs vs. one incandescent.
But those bulbs are rated for 15,000 hours. Lets assume they all lie and deflate that by 1/3 (maybe a power surge will hit a few years in). That single $3 bulb still saves you 10 x $10 = $100 in electricity costs vs incandescents over its useful life. A bit more if you pay California electricity rates, a bit less if you live near some hydro co-op. But the difference is large enough that the effect is true no matter where you are.
So yeah, top-range lamps give better results than the cheapo stuff, but top range isn't that much more expensive, and the lifetime savings of going to LED are hard to ignore -- op-ex vs. cap-ex if you will.
and they last 1000 hours. Technology has evolved. Also the methods to take your money.
But I also live in a small NYC apartment, so I don't have your typical suburban house with 20+ light fixtures to deal with, I only have 6.
I drive a shallow car with old lights, and once I was blocked on a street by a much taller car sitting in front of me with very bright LED lights, and I couldn't see a thing because of the glare. I was unable to manoeuvre out the way because of this. They sat there for a minute or so stubbornly refusing to move for me before finally moving out the way.
What I miss are the old low-pressure sodium street lights that used to be ubiquitous in the UK. Not everyone's cup of tea but they were highly efficient (outperforming LEDs for a surprisingly long time) and had this cool property of being so monochromatic they ate the colours out of everything. This made them useful for astronomers because their light was easily filtered, and reduced their impact on wildlife relative to harsh blueish LEDs. The main reason I like them is aesthetic though, they made night look like night rather than a poor approximation of day.
Thankfully my local area have given up trying to use the really harsh white they put in initially, and have at least starting putting in warmer LEDs.
It was so monochromatic that we thought we lost our shuttle bus stickers that were stuck to our shirts, and would have to walk around instead of being able to hop-on/hop-off. What a relief it was to emerge in daylight.
The wavelength is so specific that it can have all kinds of cool applications:
On a long enough timeline, everything is disposable. And what is "disposal", really? How many LED bulbs are actually getting properly recycled, and isn't it true that the materials in incandescent bulbs are less harmful, relatively speaking, than those in LEDs?
I don't like LED bulbs, but I think they clearly win the disposal/economical argument against incandescent in every way. Unfortunately they blink and have poor color reproduction in many versions.
Don't the costs & emissions related to manufacturing and transporting all of those incandescent bulbs.
As much as I like the old bulbs, they're unlikely to "win" in this question unless you are wanting to ignore the major lifespan difference.
As someone that has never owned a car, is vegetarian, and walks/subways everywhere, I kinda feel like what's the big deal if I use a few incandescent bulbs every year in my small NYC apartment?
Incandescents can be bad in lots of categories but if they make you happy, that's a huge plus. Some categories are much more important than others.
I'm lazy and prefer not to change bulbs multiple times a year... but the warm light is lovely when I do use a classic bulb. I live in a warm environment and hate the heat they add, but in your climate perhaps it is nice much of the year.
However, if you're like my parents, they buy lots of very cheap LED bulbs which fail quickly and flicker a lot, because since they fail so often, nice ones are too expensive.
I buy bulbs that cost a bit more up front but have less flicker (undetectable to me when waving a hand under them), higher CRI, and last longer.
However, I think I'm probably out of luck -- LEDs are cheaper and they likely don't break as much in shipping. So even if I personally find LEDs to be worse than incandescents -- they don't render reds properly, so even something simple like skin tones don't have the depth they once did, plus they give me migraines -- I likely won't be finding them on shelves anywhere near me ever again.
For bulbs tho I found this site that tests tons of them for flicker.
It was a godsend and I was able to get some Ikea bulbs with zero flicker and they’ve been great. So at least my house isn’t a flickering mess. Now I just gotta figure out a phone that’s not garbage.
Asking because I don't have a Phantom at home.
Thicker bars means a lower PWM frequency, hence lower quality light/brightness control.
The MacBook Air displays with the notch do not have PWM and do not seem to bother people. The 14/16" Pro models seem to be quite bad for most people (I had to return my new 14" model, it was rough).
The first PWM MacBook I bought was the 16" MacBook Pro from 2019 (the last Intel model). I'd had a 2018 MBP 15" and couldn't figure out why I just couldn't stand looking at the new 16". I thought I had a bad display but ended up learning about PWM.
Strangely tho there is something about PWM flicker, especially the kind that is deep cycle (basically 100% on then 100% off) that are super bad for me. I can look at an old CRT fine because it’s not completely on and off as it does it’s scanlines. But PWM is like flicking a light switch rapidly and it gives me the worst headaches.
Incidentally, I went with LIFX -- I had purchased their bulbs back when they were the only realistic option besides Philips Hue for smart RGBW bulbs[0]. Still seems those two brands produce the most flicker-free variety.
[0] LIFX was a handful of lumens brighter at the time and didn't have a hub requirement
Hyperikon used to make great, somewhat cheap bulbs, but went under during the pandemic.
These days, I just get cheap 3000K, 90+CRI ones at the hardware store, and they’re fine.
Watch out for idiocy like “smart” bulbs though. For instance, they have ones that change color temp if you rapidly flip the light switch on and off and back on.
Also, make sure they are dimmer compatible. The ones that are not flicker badly (even at full brightness on our dimmers) and burn out after a few years.
I've got a couple bulbs from Waveform Lighting and they don't flicker, but I totally can tell the reds are off.
I really hate the LED transition. My building replaced all the outdoor lights with them, and now it's just too bright to sit on my stoop at night like used to be so common here in Brooklyn. My backyard neighbor put in an LED floodlight and now I have to buy blackout curtains. I drive rarely, but the oncoming headlights are blinding when I do. It's pretty depressing if I think about it too much.