They're saying that the visual performance is indirectly affected by invisible wavelengths somehow. Not that you can see the difference between two types.

I get that they're more efficient in some sense, but man the LED streetlights and other big lamps are so irritating and make things like like such ass compared to mercury vapor or even sodium lights.

You can buy full spectrum LED lights (99 CRI, or grow lamps)

The article uses LED as synonym for typical LED lightning.

You can't buy heat lamps? They are even more infrared and last longer.

Also LED lighting can have infrared, have a significantly more smoother spectrum curve and still last +20k hours without burnout. The cheaper bulb spectra that they show is a blue led + phosphor coating, but there are infrared LEDs, UV leds, and more. You can make quite the convincing sun simulation, even better than any incandescent bulb, but there is almost no demand for UV + Infrared super full spectrum lighting unfortunately. Only movie & theater lights come close.

Typical electricity rates in Australia are up to 40c/kWh or so.

Do you really think $5 AUD per month per bulb that you’re running 8 hours a day is worth it for better spectrum quality?

They use rf numbers, which is a newer standard, so that's probably good.

However, the experimental group (extra light sources) got rf 91 bulbs, and the control ("LED lighting") got rf 85 bulbs.

The two scales are not exactly comparable, but they both max out at 100. The only source I could find that discusses both says that > 90 CRI is "excellent" and just below that is "very good". It says > 85 rf is "very good", which tells me it's comparable to a mid-80's CRI bulb.

If I accidentally buy a mid-80 CRI bulb, I either return it to the store, or just throw it away.

So, I'd say this study's experimental setup doesn't support any useful conclusions. They showed that so-painfully-bad-California-won't-subsidize-them LEDs are worse than passable LEDs with supplementation from another light source.

The passable LEDs in the study are probably comparable to the cheap ones at our local hardware store, but worse than the ones that cost $10-20 on amazon ten years ago.

This would have been much more interesting if they'd compared high-end LEDs with and without supplementation, and found a difference. (And by "high-end", I mean "still much cheaper then the electricity they save")

CRI is a pretty bad rating system. They are showing the full spectrum graphs which is what you'd want anyway. Spectral Similarity Index (SSI) is the better number

I think CRI is not important here as thats a measure in the visual spectrum. The paper talks about all the missing wavelength outside of the visual spectrum.

Out of curiosity:

a) How do Philips Hue bulbs stack up?

b) Did Philips update them generationally and assuming they are decent now, how recently?

You can also look at all the papers it's citing too...

This article is not making an extraordinary claim, and your offence is hyperbolic. Analysis of research should not be restricted to the academe, but careful not to cherry puck research.

where do you purchase yours out of curiosity? My incandescent light bulb dealer on Ebay stopped selling them...

> It's amazing how we're replaying the asbestos playbook a century later

Can you elaborate?