Ultimate LED Bulbs - Ultra High CRI - The Honorable Quest

Do you ship to the US?

I would be a bit careful rushing to conclusions. Many LED bulbs are not built to and are not rated for enclosed fixtures mostly due to the heat dissapation issues.I even have several use cases for LED lamps in enclosed fixtures. There’s not much I can do about that other then running the lamps for short spurts and hope for the best.

Another instance, is people trying to get unreasonable amounts of light from older fixtures by spec’ing the highest output lamps they can get their hands on, “after all these fixtures were rated for 60 watt incandescent, what harm will it do if I use 60 watts of LED per lampholder?” Except that the heat dissapation for LEDs means that higher output lamps will end up cooking themselves alive. I had a friend do just this with a with one of those quad ceiling lamps. They used x4 1600 lumen 5000K A19s, and you could smell the electronics burning. This is totally discounting the ugly glare that a whopping 6400 lumens of LED put out.

I’m not, and you’re wrong. These mainstream lights are cheap crap, period.

#1: fixtures are not rated for heat dissipation, but fire prevention. You know how hot incandescents get, right? RIGHT? Can you install an LED bulb that exceeds its fixture or socket wattage rating? | Waveform Lighting

#2: none of my lights were ever enclosed, not even partially.

If you read sunlike’s blog, all the US lights I took apart had 105C crap brand capacitors…and insufficient heatsinking which seemed like some kind of ceramic rather than aluminum. Chinese ones were 85C only…
EDIT: and it sounds like your friend experienced the “joys” of Hyperikon or some noname china brand with those burnouts… glare is a non issue it depends though…

I posted all of my LED strips/bulbs test results in this thread. They are mostly LED strips.

WorldWide (5:money_mouth_face:, except Zimbabwe (Rhodesia)

You don’t know to what long term operational tolerances the engineers had in mind. You have some general idea of some of the limitations of some of the hardware. Also, can you confirm what fixtures all those people were using those failed bulbs in? When push comes to shove, a reputable manufacturer will stand behind their product. but a small company that went out of existence won’t. Buying from a small startup company that claims some few great things large scale is not the wisest decision. Large scale street light installations are a good example of this with cities frequently choosing the big manufacturers like Cree, GE, and Leotek. They don’t want to end up down the road with a bunch of failing lights, like Berkley or Detroit, and not have something to fall back onto. Good luck claiming a mass warranty failure from bankrupt/closed/merger-ed company! Not to derail this thread since these sun-likes look really good.

Nope. They were not Hyperikons.

Glare is very much an issue. It’s why we have things like minimum and sometimes maxmimum recommended light levels and daylighting methods that reduce the sun’s glare through skylights with things recessing and panelization.

As far as the durability is concerned, the lifespan of the lights are most likely dependent on the electrolytic capacitors on the driver circuits. LED failed visibly flickering usually caused by capacitor failures.

So, make sure that wherever you sourced the driver from, the capacitors must be of high-quality with high hour-rating and temperature. The driver compartment of the LED light is usually toasty.

That's terrific, thanks for this documentation!

Light quality-wise, in order to ease separation of bulbs, I wish to insist a bit more on R9 and R12: both sides of the Achille's heel for many high CRI claiming lights. To achieve that I'm proposing the following tweak to the current Qf formula :

Qf = [(Ra *1)+(R9*3)+(R12*3)+(Rf*3)] / 10 >> Qf = [(Ra *1)+(R9*3)+(R12*3)+(Rf*2)] / 9

That way :

  • There is a bit more progressivity: "R9 = R12 > Rf > Ra"
  • Ra is a third of the R9 and R12 importance
  • The recent Rf is two times more important than the older Ra

What do you think?

Is there any practical difference between korean/china sunlike leds aside from china being cheaper and higher cri? Like… is the mtbf double on korean ones???

Does not ship to USA, California due to some California regulations based on the response I got from them. I wanted to purchase a few bulbs from them to test and then a set to put in my house if it is good.
Is there any alternatives?

I went on sunlikelamp.com, But the site is difficult to understand, each LED has a chart of 7 tests with varying R9 values. I don’t know what matches to what. Anyone have experience from them? I want to test their bulbs. They also do not show the duv/tint value I believe. I definitely want something below BBL, or a tiny bit rosy.

I just ordered a bulb from him. The website could definitely use some updating. The charts are labelled with the LED so you can figure out which one matches the model # of the option you selected.

I live in California and have bought from waveformlighting before. You can see test results in my earlier link.

I was in check out and was blocked from shipping. Could you try again to see if it was a new policy waveformlighting added?

It’s a little naughty, but you might be able to bypass the restriction by choosing “Nevada” as the state, then adding the letters “CA” to your town name. The website should be none the wiser, and the delivery company will figure it out.

I entered my address and it gave me shipping options. I suggest you send them an email. Also try using another browser.

I sent them an email and this was the response:

I guess I’ll try some round about methods.

SAW (Korean) - its TRI-R (3-R) technology. It is with violet crystals only.
SOL (China) - it is with ~4 types of crystals.

I think that 3-R is more durable, and if violet peack will appear after years and years of uses, it will be ok (SORAA, yuji, samsung master color - all of them have violet peack)

there is tests with duv for SAW (TRI-R) 5000k and 4000k from 2018

I have 2 buyers from this forum already. 6w 4000k SOL and 9w 3000k SAW, may be they will publikate tests
Also I sended 10xss with 4 types of SOLs to test to maukka

I can't vouch for the shipping carrier (...as I don't know them), but I totally vouch for maukka completing the test once the bulb arrived, in the coming days/weeks.

And that's why, currently in our "Light Bulb table", your SunLike bulbs are referred as "Test to come".

PS: so far, based on your manufacturer tests you are #1 of this table. Congrats Adam!