w1retap
[H]F Junkie
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Yep.. There goes another today. Switching these over to incandescent.
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ILLEGAL to sell regular lightbulbs after August 1st
- Thread starter Comixbooks
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Comixbooks
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I tried Warm bulbs Better Homes and Garden Ambers in different shades they are amazing at first my eyes are really relaxed but when I goto work at Walmart under the floresants it's horrible. Kinda the same effect if you use Windows Night Light on Windows 11 OS just masking the problem. Come to think of it I never used Windows Night Light in my OLED monitor should try that sometime but it's similar to my Amoled phone using blue light reduction.
Comixbooks
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Amazon still has them but not sold by Amazon cheaper than eBay. Same bulbs I picked up a few months back the blue boxes ones are made in Hungary.
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In 2015 I replaced all the bulbs in my house (nearly 4,000 square feet and very well lit) with the best LEDs that could be found. By 2020 a few of them had failed and the same models weren't available anymore so I had to relamp all 27 bulbs in the kitchen to make them all match. That said the rest are still kicking from 2015.
And don't even get me started about Color Reproduction Index (CRI). I have found a real love for 5000k LED lighting that has a CRI above 90.
The problem is that most LED lights are cheap crap that don't reproduce color well, especially reds and and secondarily greens. People focus only on the color temperature chart and then wonder why every LED bulb or fixture they buy seems terrible and wonder why rooms look dull and lifeless and the color temperature is only half the story at most. We need to start demanding very high color reproduction for every light we have to live under. If the package doesn't tell you what the CRI is, or if it does and it is not 90+, don't use it somewhere you are going to spend a lot of time.
The problem is that most LED lights are cheap crap that don't reproduce color well, especially reds and and secondarily greens. People focus only on the color temperature chart and then wonder why every LED bulb or fixture they buy seems terrible and wonder why rooms look dull and lifeless and the color temperature is only half the story at most. We need to start demanding very high color reproduction for every light we have to live under. If the package doesn't tell you what the CRI is, or if it does and it is not 90+, don't use it somewhere you are going to spend a lot of time.
Showbiz
[H]ard|Gawd
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You got most of this correct. First, a minor nit pick - CRI actually stands for Color Rendering Index. And to clarify for everyone else, this is referring to the quality of white light.
Second, While your premise is generally correct, CRI is actually a horrible metric to use for color rendering from LEDs, and I wish manufacturers would stop using it. While CRI has 15 color chips in it's testing gamut, only the first 8 are used, and they're mostly muted pastels, none of them are very saturated. It is also very easy to game the CRI metric to make it appear as though your bulb has better quality becaue it's a simple average calculation. Say for instance your bulb has a ton of green output (R4-6), that makes your overall average higher, and thus you get a higher score, but that doesn't mean that you're getting more of the reds/oranges/purples. A lot of LED bulbs also have a minus green filter as well to make it appear to your eye as though they're rendering better. TM-30 is a much better metric, but more on that later.
CRI was originally developed for measuring the color rendering of fluorescent fixtures. This is important to understand because the way fluorescent bulbs and LEDs create white light is very different. When it comes to LEDs, there actually is no white LED. What we currently have for white LEDs are blue LEDs with a yellow phosphor slapped on top of the blue LED. This is why very low quality and high color temperature LEDs can appear to have a green tint, Blue + Yellow = Green (this is where the need for a minus green filter comes in).
Also FWIW, the human eye tends to interpret blue lights as brighter than other colors, so lights that have a cooler color temperature (>6500k) will appear to be brighter than warmer fixtures of a lower color temperature (<3500k) even though they may have the same lux rating.
Now TM-30 is a much better metric, and I wish that manufacturers would start including that information on the packaging. First, it uses 99 color chips many, of which are saturated, and they are all used in the calculation of the score (as opposed to CRI's 8). Second, it uses the square root mean method to calculate the score and thus is a lot more difficult to game. Not only that, but it has a really cool set of graphics which could also be included on the box to show not only the gamut, but the fidelity as well (in addition to the scores of course).
Now it is true that you cannot have a good TM-30 score with out also having a high CRI score. But this is because the spectrum of color for CRI is included with the TM-30 test. You can in fact have a high CRI score, and a really terrible TM-30 score.
Thank you for coming to my TED talk, time to mow the lawn.
Always nice to have a more technical explanation. Mostly in my experience, I was flat out shocked just how randomly bad color rendering (not reproduction I used the wrong word sorry) can be on a lot of LED lights. It's a topic I knew about from outdoor lighting like sodium lights etc, and I knew that there's a reason jewelers used halogen lamps to light jewelry but it seems like the absolute wild west out there when it comes to finding out what any particular random LED light produces. If you narrow a search of lights down to only ones that list or mention some kind of CRI number it's amazing how hundreds of results suddenly becomes maybe 5.