I was on Amazon today and noticed that my favorite high-CRI Hyperikon Bulbs are on sale! It’s so hard to find high CRI bulbs at a good price. But these are not without a downside, like all mass-produced LED bulbs they suffer from small tint issues. This makes them appear a bit green or rosy, depending on their + or - offset from the Black Body Locus. But I can correct that. As I mentioned here about a year ago, I now make tint-correction paint and apply it to all my bulbs. I have been enjoying boxes and boxes of these Hyperikon in my house (most with tint correction) for quite a while, without issue. So I thought I would see if there is interest here on BLF for me to use my spectrometer/skills/coatings to buy/correct/deliver these to anyone interested.
For this 2700k, CRI93, Duv 0 (equivalent to a warm-white incandescent)
$14.36 (cost of 6-pack)
$12.00 ($2 per bulb to test/coat/verify)
$06.00 (USA Shipping)
$01.24 (Paypal fee)
$33.60 ($5.60 per bulb)
For this 3000k, CRI93, Duv 0 (equivalent to a soft-white incandescent)
$15.00 (cost of 6-pack)
$12.00 ($2 per bulb to test/coat/verify)
$06.00 (USA Shipping)
$01.26 (Paypal fee)
$34.26 ($5.71 per bulb)
Thoughts welcome. If you are interested, please tell how many and what colorTemp.
I kinda expected to be buying/painting some bulbs this week. I would have been all over this myself if it was an option to me a few years ago. If anyone knows of a cheaper way to get such a good spectrum, don’t be shy, post it here for me and others to learn about.
But the prices mentioned in the OP are expired whenever the Hyperikon prices on Amazon return to normal. That could happen at any moment for all I know. In their 2 YEARS on Amazon, the price has never been anywhere near this low according to keepa price tracking.
It’s surprising to me how little activity there is in this subforum. Are there any other communities on the web that focus on high quality LED home/commercial lighting sources (not just for growing weed)?
I think the issue is that getting a great LED bulb is so tricky that people just give up on LED and move to Halogen. Halogen is just incandescent with an efficiency enhancement. Nothing that puts it in the league of LED, but better than raw incandescent.
I thought, “Tint free” only applies to emitters on par with, or better than Nichia Optisolis 5000K/6500K (up to 4000K, they are inferior, because of fundamental differences - they have a noticeable light blue/cyan weakness (dip), which the higher CCT Optisolis don’t).
Even Luminus SST-20 and Nichia E21A at ~95-96 CRI exhibit some kind of tint.
No offense, but at only 93 CRI, I feel like I was being clickbaited
(Still, upgrading to lower 90-ish CRI still does worth from the so-called “standard” 80 CRI)
Edit: it seems, that I didn’t read all, which was written. So you apply correction painting manually. Ok, now I got it.
I felt the same about all the $20 Cree bulbs with 20-year warranties that I bought years ago. They only lasted 3-4 years, then most died. These days I feel Sunlike are better made than the Cree, but I’ve been wrong before, obviously.
These days I believe in good LEDs for the 2-dozen or so lights you run the most hours every day/night. And halogen everywhere else. It sounds like you don’t mind spending 22x6=$132 for one room. If that’s in your budget, I agree Sunlike is where you should invest.
It really isn’t possible to have a sufficient heatsink and reliable driver for less than that. I still use quite a few cheap Hyperikon bulbs but I’m replacing them as they die with Sunlike. One nice side effect of having beefy drivers is that the Sunlike bulbs don’t flicker when my car is charging which around a third of my hyperikon bulbs do.
Have a look at one of my Cree that died:
It had a huge aluminum heatsink, a 20 year warranty, and a $20 price tag to match. And it’s from my large box of matching dead bulbs. What kind of warranty do the Sunlike come with?? Does that warranty cover spectrum deterioration as the LED ages? That’s a real problem.
I just did a count, today’s dead bulb brings the total to 20. 20 bulbs x $20 each = $400 lost. I wanted to send them in and lay claim to that 20-year warranty they had, but the receipt paper has gone blank from 5 years worth of age as it always does. I’m probably screwed.
The old Cree bulbs have a CRI of 84 and a R9 of just 17. So the new Cree should be noticeably better since they are advertised with a CRI of 90. I stared into a Hyperikon to see if I could understand what you meant by the light not being smooth, but it looks like shear perfection on my bulbs. They are as evenly lit as the sun. You must have a different model.
