LED lights can look like anything. My son has LED lights in his room that can flash in all the colours of the rainbow. We have a couple of LED bulbs that do a very good approximation of those dim incandescent bulbs were you can clearly see the filaments.

Just shop around for better LED lights. There's a lot of variation out there.

They can look, to your eyes, "like anything."

The problem is that the spectrum, which impacts "how other things look to your eyes," can be a wide range of things, ranging from "quite decent" to "a hot, peaky mess." They look the same in terms of how your eyes perceive the bulb, but other things will look very different. If you've ever had a pure RGB LED, and wondered why things look "wrong" when it's set to white, that's the problem - it's three very peaky emissions, and while it looks white, everything else looks wrong in it.

CRI measures this, and as soon as you get the RGB emitters online, the multi-color bulb CRIs tend to head downhill in a hurry.

You can see spectrometer graphs from a Philips bulb I reviewed here: https://www.sevarg.net/2023/03/11/philips-smart-wifi-bulbs/ - it's a good bit better than some of the other bulbs, but it's still easy to get it off the white emitter and into the peaky RGB emitters.

Wow, those bulbs are very good. Way better than I expected from smart RGB bulbs. Any random bulb one can get on the market will be way worse, probably even the white ones.

But yes, anything under than will still look "blueish" if it reflects the right tones of blue, or "brownish" if it only reflects the wrong ones. It's just much better than almost every other LED.

wow, as soon as we switched to LED bulbs I noticed something was "off" in the house and couldn't really put my finger on it.

Thanks for this comment, I guess I gotta do some research on this now.

Shop where? Surely not in your nearest retail, you'll have hard time to get consistent quality (flicker free, CRI, consistent color temperature, and perhaps most important, longevity)

Home Depot. Or probably any other big-box home improvement store. They have far more selections for lighting than other retail stores.

CREE and Philips bulbs are 3-5x the price of Home Depot's cheapest LEDs but for me pay for themselves in their longevity and quality.

CREE isn't that much more expensive where I live - I haven't needed to buy one in a while(!) but the last time I bought one I'd say they were more like 30% to 50% more, not 3x to 5x. The CREE is definitely cheaper than the Phillips.

That's why I use CREE. Fantastic bulbs at a reasonable price - a truly good value!

OK, but if you are willing to pay 3-5x vs the cheapest LEDS, that seems like an odd comparison. Are the ones at Home Depot that are 3-5x the cost of their cheapest bulbs also underperforming compared to the ones you bought?

Shop at Amazon. If it doesn't match the description return it. I usually buy daylight bulbs and only one time did I have color matching problems even with different brands.

Skip the middle-man markup and go to the source. Amazon adds no value, only cost.

https://www.aliexpress.us/w/wholesale-incandescent-e27.html?...

Or Alibaba if you want even cheaper prices at the expense of some research time.

"Skip the middle man, get it at Chinese Amazon instead"?

If you want to skip the middle man, order it directly from the manufacturer.

And there are tons of webshops selling a very wide selection of led lights. No need to send people to the big monopolists.

It's Chinese Ebay, where the manufacturer is selling.

Most of them won't even accept direct orders.

Can you list some of those shops? I'm hard pressed to find one that isn't selling items that were drop-shipped to them from Aliexpress/baba and then marked up. It may not be direct from the manufacturer, but going from N-middlemen to 1-middleman is about the best you can do right now.

no kidding. I just bought a set of them. 3 levels of brightness and 2 k levels and a few different colors. If you shop around more you can get stuff that is even more complex and programmable. I mostly wanted something a bit more yellow and dimmable. The trick is to look at the kelvin levels. Find the bulb you have find out its k level and pick an LED that is close to that or can do that.

Thread hijack: Is there a simple cause for the terrible longevity I'm getting with LED bulbs in my house? Regardless of the bulb brand, regardless of the fixture type, regardless of bulb orientation, seemingly regardless of the amount of use my LED bulbs start flickering and periodically turning off after the bulbs are 1-2 years old. It's maddening. I've tried expensive name brand bulbs (Phillips being the most recent one that comes to mind) and less well-regarded bulbs (Feit Electric, Sylvania, IKEA) and my experiences haven't varied. I love the quality of the light and the instant full brightness. I hate that I'm always replacing a bulb somewhere.

There's two main failure modes: thermal and interference.

Thermal should be obvious. The components in the bulb's internal power supply can only withstand so much heat.

Interference is harder to track down. Old dimmers designed for incandescent bulbs will destroy LEDs very quickly. Since the problem seems so endemic, I suspect you have a more serious issue with your electrical service. Your AC voltage may be too high or low, or there's some equipment nearby or in your house that's putting a bunch of noise into the AC lines. Likely causes are old, improperly filtered inductive loads. That'd be anything with a big motor in it: washer, dryer, fridge, HVAC, pumps and fans. If you have any old dimmers anywhere in your house, remove them. You can also call your electric utility to see if they can send someone to check it out. They're usually pretty serious about interference like this because it can spread.

Hum... AFAIK, if the LEDs are controlled by a resistive load, any harmful interference should be easy to remove by just adding a varistor between its pins. (Those "filters" for electrical outlets usually have exactly that.)

If the LEDs have a switching power supply, they should survive basically any high-frequency noise, and any overvoltage that is small enough to pass unnoticed. Leaving only small average voltages to deal with (like from dimmers). Those should be detectable with a multimeter.

They're a switching power supply.

But you're making a mistake. You're confusing "should, in a competently designed power supply," with "does, in something trimmed to the absolute lowest cost that will mostly make it through warranty on a product in which nobody keeps the receipts and such around to make the warranty claim."

Well, ok, if you insist on iterating on the design until you take the last tenth of a cent from the marginal cost, you'll get something that can't handle transients or small excess voltage.

But iterating on the design is expensive too. And that optimization is well within the region where your suppliers will often cheat(?) and add all that quality back without telling you just because some of their customers demand it and it's cheaper to give you high-quality products than to retool their factories.

Or, in other words, it's quite possible that you have a bulb here or there fail due to those. But you won't get consistent failure with several brands.

When you make ten million bulbs, saving ten cents on each one puts a million dollars into your pocket. Shaving just one cent off each bulb is still a cool hundred grand.

Heat. Almost all modern fixtures count as "enclosed" - and most LED bulbs, if you look closely on the case, aren't rated for "enclosed or recessed" use. Basically, they're fine, if they're upright in a table lamp or so.

Most modern fixtures are recessed, and the bulbs are "upside down" - so the heat builds up in the base of them, where the power electronics are, and simply fries them. There's a typical, handwaving, "For each 10C above design temperature, the lifetime halves" curve you can apply, and those power electronics are running way above design temperature in "almost all modern uses." So they die quickly.

An enclosed rated bulb is worth trying, if you can find one that does what you want. But good luck. They're cheap consumer devices at this point, built to a price point.

I had the same problem and it's the light fixture.

LEDs (or actually their power electronics) can't stand nearly the same temperatures that incandescent lights can, so they get cooked. You'll notice brownish stuff coming out of the base when it happens.

My fixture was a series of thick, donut-shaped aluminium rings connected via spacers forming a sphere around the bulb approximately the size of a melon. Three such spheres in total.

The damn thing destroyed two whole sets of lights before I:

-Disassembled one of the fixtures so that only the top is left, exposing the ceramic base.

-Replaced the other two with "efficient mood lighting" 2W 2700K bulbs - those with a transparent head mimicking a glass bulb.

It's not particularly beautiful, but hadn't had any problems since.

I've had great LED longevity. Early in 2017 my electric company was doing some kind of instant rebate deal with retailers so that the rebate was taken off automatically at the register. It brought Walmart's "Great Value" brand non-dimmable 800 and 450 lumen bulbs down to $0.17.

I went around the house counting bulbs, found that I had something like 26 incandescent 60 W or 40 W bulbs, and bought enough Walmart bulbs to replace them, plus another dozen to have spares. Since then all my non-smart bulbs other than the small incandescents in some appliances, two incandescents used as heaters in my well shed, and two that are in places I don't go (attic and crawlspace) have been those Great Value bulbs.

I've only had one fail in the 6.5 years since then. That was one in the garage that I dropped onto the concrete floor when screwing it in. They are plastic, not glass, so it didn't shatter like a glass bulb would, but it did not work afterwards.

I gave it to someone at work who was interested in taking it apart to see what broke. If I recall correctly there is an inductor on the PCB is just attached by some thing wire leads and one of those leads broke.

So it's not going to be appropriate everywhere, but when I have a cursed light fixture [live in an old house, out in the boonies], I've had good luck with the ultra-fancy designer LED bulbs that try to look like old Edison bulbs.

They're usually not as bright as other bulbs, which isn't suitable for all applications [although desirable in others].

Not an expert. The LED lamps require a driver circuit, which are generally poorly designed. Any gains in the possible lifespan of LEDs is offset by these, allowing manufacturers to sell LED lamps more often…not as often as older technologies, but it gets there sometimes. Poor drivers can also cause flickering and other issues.

And at 10 times the cost!

So glad we’ve “saved” so much electricity.

flickering: all them use switching power supply, which if wrong ones or in wrong conditions, usualy die in few months. Not only because of heat, but also close-to-limits voltages and such. And because they put $0.15 capacitors ones instead of $0.25 ones.

And this is not only (cheap) home stuff, you can see this effect walking around in parks or streets, where a lamp is $100..

i have 7-8 long-fluorescent-substitues doing this at home, replaced capacitors in 2 of them, then replaced whole power supplies in 2 others.. then replaced the rest with whole new lamps as the price vs hassle/time-waste did not make sense..

Edit: but as sibling in thread says, if it soo repeatable, something is wrong in your electricity network at home. There is some source of disturbance, maybe even at neighbours. Long ago one bad laptop switching power supply was making an LCD display go crazy 4 rooms away.

Personally I've had way better luck going with the next-to-cheapest brand versus the cheapest brand.

Since you've tried numerous brands, that implies to me (and my tiny sample size) that the problem for you is not the bulb quality, FWIW.

I always found regular incandescents slightly dingy, halogen bulbs have a much richer light.

Look for high-CRI leds with a colour temperature around 4000K . The 5/6k are quite glaring and cold, the 3k emulate the dingy yellows of low/medium-wattage incandescent.

I mostly use Trådfri IKEA bulbs. In rooms where a lot of light is required, the white-with-adjustable temperature bulbs are good. Anywhere else, the multi-colour ones.

Except for the bathroom and storage room, all lights in the flat are “smart”.

I'm a very color rendering index sensitive person. As it seems to be the case with you, I cannot stand narrow spectrum lights in my home, especially in areas where food is prepared or consumed. I also can't stand light with high color temperatures (ie blueish lights), unless it's in a working area like a garage workshop or gym.

If you are willing to spend more money (from my experience the cost is about double of what you would pay for narrow spectrum LEDs), there are good options available for warm, high CRI lighting.

To give you an example of lights that I recently installed and am quite happy with: https://www.solidapollo.com/Candlelight-Warm-White-ULTRA-Hig...

Unfortunately, there is no replacement for tungsten filament bulbs.

Nothing beats the warm soothing glow of those things. I use long-life low-watt appliance tungstens in all my lamps, and I will never part with them. The light is superior to that emitted from LEDs, and the appliance bulbs are actually cheaper and more reliable than LEDs, believe it or not. With tungstens, I sleep better, my house is cozier, and I save some money.

LED bulbs are a meme.

None of that is true. But thinking makes it so.

I'm in the market for some lighting now and my dream is to have OLED lights:

https://www.omled.com/product-page/omled-one-s5l

They're eye-wateringly expensive and not particularly bright, but the spectrum is reportedly much friendlier than LEDs and they're currently making their way to the automotive world, so prices might decrease over time.

A more realistic proposition might be red phosphorus LEDs:

https://store.yujiintl.com/collections/high-cri-led-technolo...

The key thing is that CRI doesn't tell the whole story about a light's spectrum, as it's an average of 15 test colours and R9 - red - often scores very low, producing a visibly worse image despite high CRI.

Look for lights that advertise high R9.

I have a 20/strip Nichia 757 2700K LEDs with CRI 90+ [1] taped on the back of each monitor, cost me around €25 with the appropriate power supply [2]. I control them with a Shelly RGBW2, which I bought for an additional €20.

I run them at between 25-50% brightness most of the time.

[1] https://www.leds.shop/products/conextbar-power-supply-module...

[2] https://www.leds.shop/products/meanwell-lph-18-24w-power-sup...

I have something like this it’s very nice at the warmest setting but only equal to maybe 25w incandescent. https://www.amazon.com/ONLSITY-Pendant-Lights-Outdoor-Contro... I think the defused cover on these lights make them exceptional source of light.

For regular bulbs I use Energetic Edison style bulb https://www.amazon.com/Equivalent-Filament-Daylight-Non-Dimm...

Philips Hue lights (RGB or just color temp) where appropriate. Philips 'Ultra Definition' bulbs or GE Relax HD LED bulbs where dumb bulbs are appropriate.

Paying a few dollars more for the broad-spectrum LED bulbs really does make a difference in light quality.

Shame they enshittified their product:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/28/23892761/philips-hue-app-...

Yeah, the actual smarthome stuff sucks, but protocol-wise they're all compatible so you can use any zigbee hub most of the time.

True. But I just set that up once and then control them through HomeKit ever since. They've always required an account if you want to use their app to control your lights while not at home.

Interesting previous discussion that touches upon LED and light quality: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35371750

I've grown accustomed to compact fluorescent bulbs these days - mainly to having been given a lot of them for free about 10 years ago. I suspect that I shall be using them for a while yet as my stock pile of them is still filling a shelf in one of my cupboards :)

Strangely the thing that I really noticed when we stopped using incandescent bulbs was that it felt a lot colder during winter nights, as the majority of the energy the old bulbs drew was converted to heat rather than light.

I just switched out some CFL for LED. A couple of them I go to switch them out and realized I had already switched them out and they color temp was exactly the same. I am now switching many of mine out for a more yellow dimmer color. The ones I got for free were good for work spaces but not living room/bed room lightning. But those CFL's are troopers only had one stop working in 15 years out of 20 and I still have a box of 20 of them that have never been opened plus the 20 or so LED ones that I got for free too. If anyone is wondering how I ended up with a bunch of free ones check out your power bill. Many times power companies will run a promotion and just ship you a box of them.

It's not just the waste heat. If you're well positioned, the radiant heat off an incandescent can heat a human body very effectively. Remember the "heat lamps" some bathrooms used to have? The same effect is found in regular lighting incandescents, especially if you're directly below an overhead fixture.

"Radiant heating of humans" is rather substantially more efficient, in terms of "human happiness per watt used," than heating the entire house. I've got some radiant heat panels that get used heavily in the winter, and there's nothing like a good radiant kerosene heater (mine is 10k BTU, about 3kW, almost entirely as heat) on a cold winter night.

> Strangely the thing that I really noticed when we stopped using incandescent bulbs was that it felt a lot colder during winter nights, as the majority of the energy the old bulbs drew was converted to heat rather than light.

I swap in incandescent builds into a certain cold room in the winter, to deliberately exploit that effect, then I swap them out for LEDs during the summer.

IIRC, it wasn't uncommon to use incandescent builds as cheap heating elements. IIRC, early in the push to ban incandescent bulbs, some German tried to sell them as "heat bulbs," but got squashed by the regulators.

A side effect is really just an effect, and they can be useful. In the race to totally ban things, that often gets lost.

The Easy Bake Oven was built completely around that idea - small incandescent bulb used as the heating element in a kid-friendly small electric oven.

I've got the color/RGB Philips Hue bulbs indoors and I find you can change them to a nice warm yellow color which is nice but they also can be changed to act like a candle.

These are Christmas light specific - but Tru-Tone makes LED bulbs that look like filament bulbs: https://www.tru-tone.com/. I've just ordered some so I'll update this comment once I've had a look.

Phosphor leds are a little better. the "warm filament" style and the white leds that get used for projectors and grow lights are both a little better than single frequency LED lights.

Multi element LED banks are good if distant and diffused; but direct lighting from multiple points like that produces fun multiple colored shadows and that is exhausting for close eyeball work, I find. Not good for photography either.

prohibiting incandescent bulbs made less sense than prohibiting alcohol

post-tungsten.. not yet: stock halogen/sodium sticks/bulbs while still possible

or i you must:

- search for LEDs with CRI>90, beeter >=95. beware, it is NOT easy.

Very hard to find recently. Strips, panels, bulbs.. anything. No idea why but (at least in East Europe) these were more available 2 years ago than now.

Don't use one huge single source, have instead many smaller, "constellation" like (It's the resulting Lux'es-at-surface that matter not source Lumens). Mix and match (more of) 3000k + (less of) 4000k, avoid 6000k. e.g. 6x3W 3000K CRI90 + 4x3W 4000K CRI90 in a criss-cross "grating". Or have them on/off in variable ratios and few switches. Dimmable? up to you.

i have at home several such "chandeliers" made out of whatever-materials-were-around.. work perfectly :)

(quickly hacked page :) https://svilendobrev.com/napravisam/lampa/

have fun

For as long as I may remember, I've had the same problem. I detest artificial light and I'm a sucker for the twilit, moonlit, and candlelit. Seems like modernization means having every single dark corner illuminated.

Aren't there types of candles that are long-lasting and which don't give off the seemingly bad chemicals I tend to hear about?

Every dark corner... of your yard. I can read outdoors by some people's lighting that's well over 1/4 mile away on an otherwise dark night.

Get a cold blast kerosene lantern (Dietz Blizzard is my go-to lantern these days), run some kerosene substitute in it, and you'll have a clean burning lamp that doesn't put out nearly the particulates of a candle with any slight air movement.

Great lantern analysis on your blog! I initially thought the Comet was right up my alley but seems like the Jupiter is a happy medium.

I have a Jupiter, and if I were you, I'd get the Blizzard.

The advantage of the Jupiter is that the font is gigantic. It holds enough fuel for several days burning - which is the point, it was a "weekend greenhouse heater" lantern, originally.

The Blizzard is a better looking lamp, puts out a bit more light (it drafts a bit better with the taller globe), and is far more at home in a house.

Don't get a Comet for indoor use. They're better than nothing, and after you've burned off the paint, they're... tolerable for casual carry around use, but that's about it. They're just not a great lantern for regular use.

Any kind of fire will spread "bad chemicals" around it. You just get to choose what variety of them you want.

You could get 2-40 watt "appliance bulbs" meant for use in ovens, etc... and use a RAID-1 adapter* to fit them into a single socket... that'll get you 80 watts of pure incandescent joy.

If you were a tetrachromat, you'd be particularly sensitive to color gamut.

* - AKA "Y" adapter

Philips Ultra Definition line is quite good. Around $2-5 a bulb, come in a variety of wattages and styles, and they make a 2700k bulb that dims to 2000-2200k as it dims which mimics the incandescent dimming behavior. They’re also all 95CRI with decent R9 for the price.

Are incandescent bulbs still a thing in the US? In France they got banned like 10 years ago and it’s not a problem for anyone anymore…

Honestly, you’re just being dramatic over nothing. Just buy warm LED bulbs and favor accent lamps instead of the big light.

I use the 40 watt “appliance bulb” incandescents that you can still get when feasible - like in my small office. But they only work for certain situations- hard to fully light a room on 40 watt bulbs, but for accent lighting they are great.

LEDs can satisfy the color temperature of incandescents. They're actually fuller spectrum. They are designed for such. You can purchase a wide range of them. They're also extremely more efficient.

Decorative Edison incandescents. They're exempt. I like dim lights anyway. Just watch out for LED ones that they're trying to pass off as incandescent.

2200K LED bulbs. For example, GE's vintage style. Still not as good as an incandescent. Finding a really good, dimmable, warm, LED bulb is still elusive.

I did some testing a few years ago of the dimming of a handful of "smart" bulbs.

My test was to put the bulbs into a desk lamp that was aimed straight down at the desk. On the desk was a lux meter. The meter was 41 cm away from the bulb. I was in a closed room with blackout curtains on the window and it was night. I'd turn out all other lights before measuring a bulb.

Here are the bulbs I tested and the labels for their columns in the tables below:

  Label  Bulb
  TP     TP-Link Kasa white bulb
  MIW    Merkury Innovations white bulb
  HW     Hue white bulb
  MIC    Merkury Innovations color bulb set to white
  HCX    Hue color bulb set to X, where X can be
           CW cool white
           DW daylight white
           W  white
           SW soft white
           WW warm white

The various whites were set using Amazon's Alexa app rather than the Hue app.

For each of these bulbs here are the lux readings I got at 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 50, 75, and 100%:

       TP  MIW  HW   MIC  HCCW HCDW HCW HCSW HCWW
   1%  14   135  64   135  10   7   10  5    3
   2%  14   149  64   162  10   7   10  6    3
   3%  26   162  65   170  11   8   11  6    4
   4%  43   180  65   182  11   8   11  7    4
   5%  58   190  66   200  13   9   13  7    5
  10%  128  246  77   255  20   15  20  12   8
  15%  196  303  91   322  34   25  34  21   13
  20%  261  364  112  388  54   40  54  34   21
  25%  325  428  143  451  74   67  74  46   29
  50%  630  725  400  776  282  218 282 184  118
  75%  909  1008 820  1099 650  483 650 410  263
  100% 1160 1283 1382 1408 1146 850 1146 725 463

Here is the same data except for each bulb it is as a percentage of that bulb's 100% lux:

       TP     MIW    HW     MIC    HCCW   HCDW   HCW    HCSW   HCWW
  1%   1.2%   10.5%  4.6%   9.6%   0.9%   0.8%   0.9%   0.7%   0.6%
  2%   1.2%   11.6%  4.6%   11.5%  0.9%   0.8%   0.9%   0.8%   0.6%
  3%   2.2%   12.6%  4.7%   12.1%  1.0%   0.9%   1.0%   0.8%   0.9%
  4%   3.7%   14.0%  4.7%   12.9%  1.0%   0.9%   1.0%   1.0%   0.9%
  5%   5.0%   14.8%  4.8%   14.2%  1.1%   1.1%   1.1%   1.0%   1.1%
  10%  11.0%  19.2%  5.6%   18.1%  1.7%   1.8%   1.7%   1.7%   1.7%
  15%  16.9%  23.6%  6.6%   22.9%  3.0%   2.9%   3.0%   2.9%   2.8%
  20%  22.5%  28.4%  8.1%   27.6%  4.7%   4.7%   4.7%   4.7%   4.5%
  25%  28.0%  33.4%  10.3%  32.0%  6.5%   7.9%   6.5%   6.3%   6.3%
  50%  54.3%  56.5%  28.9%  55.1%  24.6%  25.6%  24.6%  25.4%  25.5%
  75%  78.4%  78.6%  59.3%  78.1%  56.7%  56.8%  56.7%  56.6%  56.8%
  100% 100.0% 100.0% 100.0% 100.0% 100.0% 100.0% 100.0% 100.0% 100.0%

I’m wondering what to do when my incandescent light bulbs in my sauna go out. I’m pretty sure leds won’t work well in a 200F+ environment.

LED-Filament. Non-smart. Very warm-white, meaning below 3000k as 'base-lighting'. For color-stuff there is other stuff.

I splurged on bulbs from Waveform Lightning for my office and bedroom. The have 95 CRI flicker free bulbs.

Huh, prices have come down on them recently. They're only about $20/bulb now. They used to be a good bit higher.

Waveform is a good example of a company that's trying to do it right - you can get photometric reports on their bulbs, with detailed spectrums, the full CRI chart (R1-R15, not just R1-R8, and, yes, their R9 values are quite good), etc.

Customer service is great too, I had one bulb die after about 9 months and they replaced it for free (and I didn't even ask, I just asked them what I need to do and the responded with a message saying they've gone ahead and shipped a replacement).

Philips Hue RGB lights. I couldn’t find non-rgb lights that would go to such levels of warmth.

get better led bulbs.

i honestly dont understand how people become so fixated on minutæ. my led bulbs look great, and i’ve never thought “wow i really miss inefficient, energy-wasting, hot, single-colour bulbs from 30 years ago”

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

People's eyes and brains vary widely. Maybe it's reasonable to accept that people see light differently and maybe some people are much more sensitive to spectrum differences. That's certainly true for flicker tolerance -- I personally get almost physically ill around flickering cheap or failing LEDs when others seem to be unaffected.

so hu what kind of lightbulb do you tolerate well ?

> single-colour bulbs

Incandescent light isn't single-color, it's all of them. Evidently that matters to some people. Things that don't matter to you might legitimately matter to other people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_rendering_index:

> A reference source, such as blackbody radiation, is defined as having a CRI of 100. This is why incandescent lamps have that rating, as they are, in effect, almost blackbody radiators.[24][25] The best possible faithfulness to a reference is specified by CRI = 100, while the very poorest is specified by a CRI below zero.

I believe the best non-incandescent bulb I've seen had a CRI of 92, but (IIRC) most bulbs don't list a number (so can be assumed to be mediocre). I don't know if it's gotten better, because I haven't deep-dived into it for a few years.

The big one to look at with CRI is the R9 index. That's the "pure red" rendering, and it's not included in the main CRI measurement. There are two types of bulbs: Those in which the R9 value is solid, and they report it, and those in which they don't report it, which means the value is crap.

You can have a reasonably high CRI for the main 8 elements, and still have very little red, which is something humans are quite sensitive to in terms of perceived light quality. It's not hard to find R9 ratings of >90 in LEDs, but you're into high end LEDs that cost quite a bit more (some of the really high end ones are $30/bulb in small quantities), and the efficiency is somewhat less (lumens per watt), because putting energy into red is less effective than "putting it all in green" with how human eyes work.

I’m not sure what you mean by “all of them”. Are you saying that incandescent light is whiter than LED light? I’m pretty sure that’s not the case.

Yup. Incandescent uses thermal emission, which has a smooth spectrum peaking in the IR. LEDs use phosphors (usually a few different ones) targeting specific wavelengths, giving it a "spikier" spectrum.

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Emission-spectra-of-diff...

To all of those arguing spectral distribution doesn't matter:

Consider Spectral Reflectance.

We use only three wavelengths for LED displays that manage to show us millions of colours, HumOns are trichromats right? So the thinking goes - we should also be able to use narrow band light sources to illuminate our physical environment with the same results. But this is just not how illumination works in the physical world.

The difference with displays, is that we are looking directly at the light source, the light source is the image; with lamps, we are looking indirectly at reflections from our physical environment, and physical surfaces reflect different wavelengths with different intensities, i.e they have a spectral reflectance curve (and these can be pretty crazy, not simple smooth curves). The other key detail is that our eyes are not narrow band, they merely quantise broad spectrum into three colours. So just because some surface might reflect brightly at 480nm but not 420nm (humans peak sensitivity), doesn't mean we don't see it, it still looks blue, just less so. The issue is that most standard LED lighting spectral output (phosphors and all) might focus on 420nm so that it looks white, but might have a dip at around 480nm so that reflections on that particular surface appear less blue than they should.

This is the issue people are experiencing when some things look too dark or too grey, surfaces have complex reflectance curves, most cheap LED lights have extremely poor spectral distribution and they can basically miss those surfaces. The more spikey and narrow band a surface's reflectance curve the more likely a narrow band light source is going to miss the reflection wavelengths and do a poor job of illuminating it.

[edit]

To be more fair to LED lighting, the comparison I made above is not entirely fair. Unlike a monitor's output LED lighting actually attempts to get broader spectrum output by adding phosphor layers to convert wavelengths of the LED, it's just that most ordinary price household LED lamps are still very poor in their distribution. It's not impossible to generate a better spectral distribution with LED sources, it's just expensive, and requires more than one LED source wavelength+phosphor combination. The other issue with cheap LEDs you might notice is that the phosphor layers tend to degrade, changing the colour temperature over time, and the inverters commonly break before the filament resulting in a very short and flickery lifetime.

I haven't used these, but this thread instigated a search, seems like there are broad spectrum LED manufacturers like this one [0]. Their target customer makes sense... Some art will undoubtedly look weird in narrow band light.

[0] https://www.savemoneycutcarbon.com/category/soraa-lighting-r...

TIL.

I stocked up on incandescent bulbs last year, and run most of mine on dimmers anymore, because that radically helps longevity. My overhead bulbs in the living room (BR30 form factor) are a good bit over a year old, but they're almost always dimmed down, if not deeply, then "a notch or two below full bright," and that increases their lifespan massively.

I went down a massive rabbit hole last year based on someone's throwaway comment about LEDs and blue, and ended up with my own spectrometer, and quite a few words written on light bulbs, blue light, etc: https://www.sevarg.net/tag/spectrometer/ It includes a lot of spectrums of LEDs vs incandescent, and explains more about the blue spike in all our modern white LEDs (because that's the way that particular bulb type works - a blue emitter with phosphor coatings around it). Unfortunately, incandescents are harder to find these days (stock up on eBay, but buy a few before you bulk - the new "standard bulb" incandescents from a lot of places sing loudly on a dimmer, and are annoyingly audible).

As for candles, skip those and go straight to kerosene lanterns. I've also gone down that rabbit hole: https://www.sevarg.net/tag/kerosene/ My advice is to get a few of the large cold blast style lanterns (the Dietz Blizzard is easily my favorite - it's a good looking lantern, and it puts out a good amount of light, while not being purely massive like the Jupiter I have), and then get some of the low sulfur kerosene substitutes (Klean Heat is one brand, Pure Heat is another, go raid your local tractor supply/farm store sort of place, though Home Depot and Lowes also carry them in my area). These are "no sulfur" fuels compared to the "low sulfur 1K kerosene," and have less of a room note when running. You basically shouldn't smell the lantern except on startup and shutdown if everything is correct, and if you put a particulate meter in the room, it should be far lower than with the candles (especially if you have any airflow at all - candles soot easily, lanterns far less so until it gets really windy).

If you look at the papers that talk about indoor kerosene particulate pollution, you'll find that the high readings come from "bare wick burners" - not a well designed cold blast lantern, which are down at the bottom of the readings, if at all.

Sorry, it's about a year late to be doing this. The new old stock bulbs I really like are no longer floating around eBay, and it's harder to find the older stock stuff anywhere. I just have what should be a lifetime supply of incandescents socked away for the rooms I use in the evenings.

Heh. Well this thread got disappeared in a hurry.

FYI, it didn't "get disappeared" (as in by a decision made by a moderator), it just attracted a lot of comments. When the number of comments exceeds the points, the score for front page position gets lowered. I notice this on other non-controversial threads, such as ones requesting recommendations on backup programs as an example.

Interesting - thanks for the clarification on the behavior!

I've found, in general, "saying anything good about incandescent lights" or "anything bad about LEDs" is exceedingly unpopular on the modern internet, no matter how much data you back your arguments up with.