Comment by ChadNauseam
19 hours ago
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.