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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. If you were listening yesterday, maybe you heard a segment going deep into LED light technology and why providing good light indoors is more complicated than flipping a switch in the LED era, with Tom Scocca, New York Magazine contributor and the editor of Indignity, a general interest publication on Substack.

Today we want to take the next step, a short consumers guide to buying LED bulbs that actually give pleasing light. Here's a little of Tom Scocca from yesterday describing some of why the light from LED bulbs often feels a little off.

Tom Scocca: The old tungsten bulb, while it's spitting out huge amounts of infrared that you can't see, it's also covering the full spectrum of visual life while the LED bulb is trying to fill in the entire spectrum but it's missing things. There are gaps in the coverage and colors don't resolve the way you expect them to.

They also don't dim in a linear way, the way that incandescent bulbs do. As the light goes down, it suddenly looks really grey, which is a natural phenomenon of color perception, but it's one that all our previous artificial lighting technology compensated for by making things look warmer and redder as the light got lower. When you see those reds popping, your eye feels like it's seeing color. If the reds are attenuated, it just feels off.

Brian Lehrer: Well, today, we'll follow up with recommendations. Joining us now to describe some choices for the best LED bulbs is Thom Dunn, staff writer at Wirecutter, who reports on home improvement topics. Wirecutter does have an article that's a New York Times consumer guide site to various kinds of products, and has some very specific LED light bulb recommendations. Thom, thanks a lot for coming on.

Thom Dunn: Hey, Brian, thanks for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we can take a question or two from you on LED light bulbs. 212-433-WNYC. 212-433-9692. I guess people are getting familiar over time now that these are mandated and incandescent or tungsten lights are going away with the technology. Maybe A19 is an important thing for you to just say what it is. Also, I see that in the Wirecutter article, you divide your recommendations into soft light LEDs, or soft white, I should say, soft white LEDs, and daylight LEDs. Could you break some of that down for us?

Thom Dunn: A19 is just the designation for the standard bold base that most people that are going to fit into most lamps, most sockets that you need. Now, obviously, you have the candelabra lights. There are different socket sizes. You often will see more specifically the A19 is the shape of the bulb, but the base is an E26. That's just the industry designation for the type of bulb it is. Generally A19, E26 is the safe thing to look for. As far as daylight soft light, that's really about the different color temperature that you're looking for. Soft white usually comes around 2700 Kelvin, and that's warmer, more reddish orange. It's similar to an incandescent bulb in that way.

It has that reddish glow, more of that glow to it, whereas a daylight bulb usually is about 5000 Kelvin. There's more blue in the color in general, but it's usually crisper.

In our guide, we talked about our testing, we took some photos of fruit bowl under different lights. It's a matter of opinion really which one you prefer but under the soft white, your apples might look a little more lush and warm and glowing to a degree, whereas under daylight, they are just going to be a crisp red. Your limes will look more natural as opposed to looking like they're under a tungsten light or an incandescent light, under that warm glow of fire.

Brian Lehrer: For your research, you spoke to lighting designer Jeff [unintelligible 00:04:47] who told you that the color rendering index, also known as CRI, the initials, has been under fire for measuring bulbs based on how well they portray pastel colors instead of more saturated colors. Now that came up in our conversation on LED bulbs yesterday as well. You point out that some bulbs now list what's called an R9 value. What can buyers look for in this respect?

Thom Dunn: Not every bulb will have the R9 value listed, but if it does, that's more of an indication of the reddish illumination. Like I said, even with the daylight bulb, it has a higher R9 value, it will more accurately create that reddish illumination that you would get out of an incandescent bulb or a fire, what have you.

The CRI, it's a useful number, but it's one of those tricks where it's an attempt to objectively quantify the way our brains hallucinate the perception of light waves. It's trying to tell you this is how close this color is to the way you think this color is supposed to be. It's still just trying to measure visible light wave that then manifests on an object that then we try to perceive with our eyes. There's a lot of stages going on.

As that result, there is a certain subjectivity, no matter what, to the color quality because it is about our personal perception. CRI attempts to quantify it as objectively as possible, but it can only go so far.

With Wirecutter testing, we try to do a good mix of those kinds of objective quantified measurements and real-world living because, as the case is with CRI, sometimes those measurements don't actually mean anything on a day-to-day basis for most people looking to buy a bulb. You can certainly look at a bulb and not know, and it says 90+ CRI or a 97 CRI, but for most people that doesn't translate to anything of value. When we're testing, we like to give more concrete examples of your lived experience on day-to-day life of how this bulb actually makes your home appear and what it is like to live with it.

Brian Lehrer: You don't see R values on the box, do you?

Thom Dunn: Some boxes have begun listing the R values. They are still catching on. I think the CRI has been the industry standard for long enough that it's become accepted and the R value is not-it's not expected as a result. It's a useful measurement to take in conjunction with the CRI.

Brian Lehrer: There's so much for a consumer to know here that they didn't have to know before. Another thing is color temperature. I think you referred to this a minute ago, but you write that you saw a bulb line for your recommendations with a range of color temperatures. Can you give a very brief explainer of how color temperature is measured and what we should look for on the box with respect to that?

Thom Dunn: Yes, it's measured in Kelvin degrees. It's about the temperature of the heat of that light wave. I think Tom touched on this yesterday and did an excellent job. Like I said, the soft white bulb which is more similar to an incandescent, usually it's called warmer but it's a lower Kelvin rating, which I understand is confusing, usually 2700 to 3500 Kelvin. Whereas "cooler," you can air quotes cooler if it's confusing, "cooler" lights are 3500 Kelvin to 5000 Kelvin or sometimes 6000 Kelvin. Different people like to have different preferences for which kind of light they prefer. My home personally is almost all 2700 Kelvin. I've spoken to some professional lighting engineers on LED projects at Feit, who at their own home, they prefer something a bit more in between, about a 3500 Kelvin. A lot of consumers seem to think they want that very crisp, more bluish 5000 Kelvin daylight.

Brian Lehrer: If somebody says I just want a bulb that lights my room really brightly like the old 100-watt bulb, what would you recommend they buy?

Thom Dunn: I recommend they buy one of the Cree or Feit 100-watt equivalent bulbs. My personal opinion is soft white is going to give you more of what you're expecting from an incandescent bulb. If you are really struggling with brightness in the room, your perception of brightness, the 5000K daylight bulb might be more what you are looking for, but the soft white is going to give you that more incandescent feel which might not be as bright feeling.

Brian Lehrer: Couple of listeners have the same question. I'm going to take Tim in Brooklyn to ask it. Tim, you're on WNYC. Hi.

Tim: Hi, Brian. My question is, is there any reading measurement or value on flicker in LED bulbs because a cheap LED bulb, I think often has poor power supply circuitry and they don't filter it well, and there's a lot of flicker, and that can be really disturbing over a long period of time.

Thom Dunn: There is no exact measurement or value or number that is ascribed to that, but the flickering is definitely a problem. That's something that Wirecutter looks over very carefully in our tests. We run through four different dimming switches during our testing process to see how well they work. Again, Tom touched this yesterday, but there is that problem, and you touched on this as well, that with the incandescent bulb, you are a dimmer, literally pulling back on the energy going into the bulb, which makes it naturally dim. With an LED, you're telling a computer to mimic that. As a result, it's not always accurate. We try to test. We know that's an issue, so we do look very carefully at it. The Cree and Feit bulbs in particular are much more reliable than a lot of other bulbs.

Brian Lehrer: Those are companies, those are brand names, right?

Thom Dunn: Yes.

Brian Lehrer: Cree, C-R-E-E, and Feit, F-E-I-T?

Thom Dunn: Yes.

Brian Lehrer: Those are Wirecutter recommendations. Let's see if I can sneak in one more here. Lee in New Rochelle, you're on WNYC. Hi, Lee.

Lee: Hi. Thanks for taking my call. I just wanted to know about the service life of these bulbs because whenever I buy them, there's like a- it says, "Lasts five years," on the box. My bulbs never last five years. They last about one year.

Brian Lehrer: Lee, I'm going to leave it there because we're going to run out of time in a sec. Thom, answer his question. Does this have anything to do with your recommendation that people always buy dimmable LED bulbs?

Thom Dunn: Hold the dimmable thought quickly. I will say that with the Cree bulbs, a big reason that we recommend them also is because they have a 10-year warranty. LED bulbs in general should last longer than incandescent bulbs, although the way they decay is different than incandescent bulbs. While they should last five, seven years, the little computers inside will start to decay over time, and that will affect your experience. The fact that Cree offers a 10-year warranty, which means if it does die before that 10-year period is up, [unintelligible 00:12:55] [crosstalk]--

Brian Lehrer: 10 seconds on dimmable.

Thom Dunn: As for dimmable, that's just more about, if LED bulbs are well dimmable, then you can already tell there's been a certain attention to detail that the designers have put into it. That, to me, indicates that this is probably a more superior product that will last you longer [unintelligible 00:13:17] [crosstalk]--

Brian Lehrer: Thom Dunn, staff writer at Wirecutter, his piece, The Best LED Light Bulb, on the New York Times Wirecutter website.

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