I’m using Cree bulbs for most of my home now. The price and efficiency is nice, but in some ways they’re disappointing.
I really like how they look in my bathroom fixtures. Each fixture holds four bulbs, and I use two 2700K plus two 5000K bulbs. The combined output looks very nice, bright and natural with broad-spectrum light. Color rendition is awesome in this setup, and is particularly nice for putting on makeup or digging out splinters or otherwise seeing subtle details.
One bathroom has two fixtures, or eight bulbs, so I use a dimmer to avoid blinding myself. That’s 6400 lumens in a little bathroom, and every time someone turns the light on at full for the first time, they flinch and cover their eyes. The dimmer can take the output from ~5 lumens up to 6400, and the lower end is only limited by the setting I configured. However, at the low end (~20 lumens or less), the cool white bulbs have a bit of difficulty “catching fire”, so to speak. The warm white bulbs are able to start producing light at very low levels, but the cool white ones often need an extra push, by turning the brightness up and then back down, or some of them won’t produce any light at all. Also, my dimmer seems to run at a difference frequency than the bulbs, so some levels flicker gently between two levels with an erratic pattern. Other levels are fine. However, all levels produce an audible hum.
I’ve tried just the 5000K bulbs in a few rooms. I like the output, mostly, and it’s great light for cleaning, but the light is still cooler than I’d like and doesn’t render color as well as I had hoped. They claim to be 80+ CRI, but it doesn’t feel like high-quality light. On a dimmer, the low settings produce a nice moonlight-like feel.
I also recently tried using only second-gen 2700K “60W” bulbs in my living room, because 5000K didn’t fit with the steampunk decor. I figured it would go well with the theme, along with my Edison bulb lamp and some incandescent downlights… but it ended up just looking like a sickly yellow instead. I am not impressed with the 2700K Cree bulbs at all. Color rendition is terrible, and the ugly yellow light makes my eyes hurt. I’d prefer to do half-and-half (2700K+5000K) like in my bathrooms, but the light fixture holds only three bulbs pointing in different directions… so mixing tints there just looks awkward.
I hope Cree will produce some genuinely high-CRI lights soon, preferably in tints like 3500K and 4500K. Or I could perhaps get some Philips lights instead, since they seem to have better light quality (but, unfortunately, they cost twice as much).