I tell my customers (I am an A/V dealer) constantly that LEDs are THE place to invest. If you amortize the cost of a quality lamp ($25 per) over the life of the bulb (lets be super conservative and say 10 years) you’re looking at roughly $.20 per month per bulb.
I understand it’s a lot to lay out up front but you’ll be paying for cheap products (in the form of headaches and poor color rendering) for the life of the inferior product, which with LED technology is a long time.
That’s the problem with poor quality LEDs, you’re stuck with them for much longer.
I’m curious to check out a couple for our nightstand lamps.
Watermanchris: 100% agree. Plus we have a 5-year warranty, so if the product does fail for whatever reason, it’s pretty easy to get a replacement out of us
hank: It’s actually a filament operating around 70 V, but we unfortunately don’t sell them. We have a pretty tightly integrated supply chain. You may consider breaking open a bulb and using the filaments from there, but consider using cheaper filament bulbs first to test as they are quite delicate
Okay, so if I’m reading all this correctly, they’re phosphor-coated filaments?
Filaments have plenty of thermal inertia that only rather drastic fluctuations should be noticeable. The driver must exhibit some pretty serious fluctuations/dropouts to visibly register. Yeah, I’d say definitely work on that.
People used to grex about “pre-flash” when flicking on moonlight/firefly mode on some lights. Having visible stutter on a lightbulb would be a pretty serious glitch.
@jon_slider It’s unclear why you think I don’t understand this discussion. I can confirm that this is a very rare issue with the US bulbs. We’ve sold 10s of thousands with mostly happy customers. Like I said, we only see visible changes in places with power that’s too noisy.
Maukka was literally the first person to test the first batch we ever shipped to Europe. It’s good to know upfront if we have a potential issue with this batch.
We will keep testing to see if it’s an isolated case or a widespread case with the European version. The prototype did not have this issue, so we are doing an investigation to see what changed from test to production.
@Lightbringer They are LED “filaments.” Similar concept to regular discrete LEDs except shaped differently, plus our custom phosphor. The stability of light output is mostly due to the driver circuit as the diodes themselves can fluctuate very rapidly to changes in input.
Europeans (EU countries + UK only): interested in helping me do a test of my bulb? I’ll send you a free Bedtime Bulb if you don’t mind helping me out with a small experiment.
I want to see if the issue that Maukka had is replicable in other regions of Europe. All I would need you to do is to screw in the bulb, observe it for a few minutes, and see if the light is constant or not. You’re free to do whatever you want with the bulb after the test.
If you are interested, please send me a private message with your name and shipping address. Also specify if you prefer the B22 Bayonet base instead of the E27 screw.
Okay, so when you say “filament” it’s more a form-factor (similar to COB LEDs but on a string vs on a board), and not a heated filament as in incandescent bulbs.
I was curious what kind of phosphor would be thermally excited to produce light… that’s what threw me by use of the term “filament”.
So it would in fact be subject to flicker, etc., if the driver passed through voltage variations (hiccoughs) in the mains supply.
Find a source of the “underling blue LED chip” and start mixing up phosphors.
I recall when the original single-phosphor “office white” fluorescents got driven out by “triple phosphor” high color rendering fluorescent tubes.
Triple phosphor lamps had another advantage, as some phosphors have a long decay time so kept puttiing out light when the AC power 60 cycle went through its zero point or the AC power flickered briefly.
Not aware of any consumer-level retailers. Maybe talk to Yuji. They can do some low-volume LED finished goods and they mix custom phosphors. Perhaps they could sell the phosphors but I can’t guarantee it.
Even a few grams can be pretty pricey though. A little goes a long way!
This is a cool page just to learn about the contribution of various phosphor materials: LED phosphors | YUJILEDS
Yes. It was phosphor on Yuji store 2 years ago. But now I can not find it in their store. It was really expensive. You do not need it, just believe me.