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Comment by jtriangle

7 months ago

It took the better part of a decade to get close to the light quality that incandescent bulbs produced, and we're still not really 1:1.

For alot of things, that's fine, but I distinctly remember having to bring clothing over to a window because the bulbs I had would not render the color of it accurately enough to put an outfit together. That's partly the clothing manufacturer's fault for using cheap dyes that are prone to metameric failure, but still, annoying.

I'm still in the process of purging the early gen LED bulbs that I have with nicer, high CRI, High Ra, variants, and getting dimmable bulbs in the places where it matters, because around me, the incandescent rollout was more of a rugpull when LED's first came out, and I snagged a couple bulk cases of cheap LED bulbs to use that were... not great.

I do keep a few decorative 'eddison' bulbs, aka squirrel cage bulbs, for reading use, as they are very warm, like 2300k, and the light they produce is very comfortable to be in at night. They use a ton of power, but, because they're not running their filaments as hard as they could, they tend to last forever. I've had one go out in ~10 years because I had removed it for cleaning and dropped it while it was hot (and also because it was hot), the envelope survived but upon being turned back on it ran for about a second before failure.

All of that to say, yes, there were downsides, mostly short/mid term downsides, some that persist to this day if you're not clever or don't know what to care about.