Comment by krackers
21 hours ago
Almost all of the bulbs you can find at a hardware store (let alone grocery store) exhibit terrible 120hz flicker. I know because I've literally tried every single one. Also it's not hard to get "high" (~90-94) CRI while nonetheless having terrible deep reds.
Out of the manufacturers you listed, only Philips Ultra Definition (95 CRI, R9 90) have low flicker and good R9. Unfortunately they are poorly made and I have to keep buying new packs each year but it's more cost effective than Yuji for lesser used areas.
Also the claim from TFA is that NIR component improves visual performance (and I've read elsewhere that NIR also has health benefits).
How about Phillips flicker-free "warm glow" bulbs? I honestly have a hard time believing that they flicker because I can literally unscrew the bulb and watch it dim gradually over the course of a second. Which indicates to me that there's a capacitor in front of the LED drivers smoothing the current out. (Which I guess is required to be compatible with triac dimmers anyway.)
Never tried those, but speaking about flicker, some LED lamps flicker not because of the mains frequency (50/60 Hz depending on where you live) but because of their internal switching power supplies.
It's mostly a crapshoot even within the same model line. Even under "Philips UltraDefinition" some styles have high flicker while others don't. I'm not sure being dimmable is any guarantee of smoothing quality, in fact dimming is usually implemented with PWM as I understand so the easy solution to avoid flicker of chucking a smoothing capacitor on there might make it harder to implement dimming. (To dim properly without noticeable I think you'd have to PWM in the kHz range. Even cheap CFLs necessarily had the technology to operate on this frequency, for some reason it seems rare for LEDs to do it.)
https://optimizeyourbiology.com/light-bulb-database
Huh, through experience with (mostly non-premium) LED bulbs, I've learned to interpret "gradually dims over the course of a second" an an early indicator of imminent bulb failure.
Have you tried LEDVance?