Incandescent light bulbs are officially banned in the U.S.::America’s ban on incandescent light bulbs, 16 years in the making, is finally a reality. Well, mostly.

  • Aceticon@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    Look at the Power Factor (PF) and Colot Reproduction Index (CRI) of the LED light bulb.

    If the former is something like 50% then it means it has a cheap power rectifier inside (little more than a bunch of diodes) which doesn’t at all filter the power fluctuating nature of AC (basically all it does is make the negative side of the sinusoidal wave that’s AC become positve and leaves the whole voltage variance from 0 to max and back untouched) hence the flickering.

    The latter quite literally tells you how good the colors look under that lighting. You want at least 90%, with more being better.

    Mind you, nowadays CRI is usually not a problem, but the whole cheap power rectification inside the bulb generally is (because a basic power rectifier can cut 10% or more of the manufacturing price of a lightbulb).