I recently replaced some pot lights. The original ones were GU-10 halogen bulbs, and now they’re Cree CR6’s. I didn’t go for CFLs. My reasoning:
- CFLs in pot lights (where the bulbs can be visible) look funny
- The few dimmable CFLs I’ve tried were not very dimmable. They’d go from 100% down to about 50%, and then off.
- I don’t want any mercury in the house
- in my experience with CFLs, frequent on/off switching makes them die about 10x sooner than advertised
- as others have said, CFLs are just an interim lighting solution
- we could have bought CFLs and replaced them with LED bulbs when LED bulbs were cheaper/better, but the CR6’s look nicer than any bulb, CFL or other.
The Cree CR6’s are superb. The CRI is I think 90, and we truly can’t tell the difference between them and the halogens we had up there before (colour-rendition-wise). They dim really well, they are 2700 K (the colour we like), they look nice on the ceiling, they’re nice and floody (the GU-10s were too “spotty” for my liking), etc. I won’t mention other benefits over the halogen GU-10’s, but there are many.
The only way I could be happier with the Cree lights is if we were able to get the NEW CR6’s, which are 800 lm instead of 575 lm, at a good price. But in our application, 575 lm was plenty, and they were on sale. For our kitchen, where we do want more light, we’ll wait for the 800-lm ones to drop in price.