[jsLavaGoat]

5700 is a terrible temperature for lighting unless that matches the daylight. Soft white and even reddish is much better at night. Presumably, most artificial light it used at night. 2700 is more like it.

My LED lightbulbs change temperature based on the time of day and are dull red at night so you both don't wake up and you don't stub your toe. Show me a non-LED that can do that.

[francisofascii]

A dimmed incandescent bulb will shift from 2700k down to maybe 2200k. Maybe not as versatile as your LED but it worked well to somewhat mimic the sun before LEDs.

[Hilliard_Ohiooo]

I do something similar and all my Philips hue bulbs are going strong after 7 to 8 years. I think people just get upset with themselves for being cheap.

[sam1714]

Lighting color is cultural. Go to Asia and you'll find many places, commercial and residential, lit with 5500K, traditionally fluorescents.

I've heard a theory that it has to do with genetics and lower eye sensitivity.

[duskdozer]

Is it by deliberate choice or something like availability? I come across enough people who don't seem to notice the difference at all, or at least until it's directly pointed out.

[simoncion]

> I've heard a theory that it has to do with genetics and lower eye sensitivity.

Might be.

But I expect that -as you said- it's cultural, rather than biological. One's sense of color is amazingly adaptable [0], but when I do a side-by-side comparison, I find that I strongly prefer the "noontime sun" color to the "incandescent bulb orange" color. As a bonus, the "noontime sun" whitepoint is pretty close to the whitepoint of my monitors, so white things on the screen are very nearly the same color as white things on my desk.

[0] Go play the game "Return of the Obra Dinn" for like an hour straight, and then be amazed at how off your understanding of what black is has become.

[pigpop]

It's called a dimmer switch.

[foobarchu]

Brightness and color temperature are orthogonal. The dimmer switch only controls brightness.

[Marsymars]

There are, however, some dumb LED bulbs that have built-in circuitry to warm as they dim. Some of them even adjust the temperature based on the dimmer switch setting without adjusting the brightness for part of the range of the switch. They're quite nice, I use them in various places.

[pigpop]

Incandescents are mostly in the red/warm end of the spectrum anyways so you don't need to change the color temperature at night.

[TacticalCoder]

> Show me a non-LED that can do that.

Many of use simply don't find LED lights, no matter the color they try to simulate, enjoyable.

I find my LED lights, including fancy decorative ones, bearable only because I always use one real, old-school, warm white (more like yellow really), incandescent (hence non-LED) light in my living room. And, yup, if you know what you're looking for, it's totally possible to still buy incandescent lightbulbs.

LED lights, no matter the shade/color always give such a fake / non-cosy feeling to just about everything.

I'm taking an actual candle + an incandescent lightbulb's warmth feeling any day over anything LED.

Now as I'm also conscious about saving the planet, I'll mix those with mostly LED lights. But having one incandescent lightbulb (and/or one candle) really creates, to many of us, a better atmosphere than pure LED lighting.

It's the old "you're eyes cannot detect more than 24 fps" all over again: "you cannot detect the flickering of a LED light". Except I can instantly tell if it's the cold (no matter how "warm white" the box says it is) light of a LED or the actual warm light of a proper incandescent lightbulb.

[tzs]

Have you tried Philips Ultra Definition bulbs? They have 1/6th the flicker percentage of incandescent bulbs and 1/3 the flicker index.

Here's a review I found of several bulbs for CRI, flicker, dimming performance, and spectral characteristics [1].

[1] https://www.thesmarthomehookup.com/25-soft-white-led-light-b...

[krackers]

There's two separate issues where LEDs still have a hard time competing with incandescent bulbs: CRI (really R9 or other deep-red measures, because CRI stats are sort of gamed) and flicker. Most LED bulbs also have poor heatsinks and are more likely to die if kept inverted or in enclosed fixtures.

All of these are individually solved problems, you just can't buy a bulb that's an e26 retrofit that satisfies all of them for whatever reason. If LED bulbs actually lasted 10 years, then there'd be 10 year warranties. Yet even the most expensive boutique LEDs (e.g. from YujiLED) are only 3 years at best.

[jsLavaGoat]

For the vast majority of people the problem was their first exposure to LED bulbs were in harsh temperatures and they wrote them off. The lightbulb wars aren't new. It's an evergreen political football.

If you strongly prefer incandescent that's fine but it doesn't take the 5-7 years the author suggests to recoup your investment. It might, or it might not. Where your curve lands depends, but they do in fact use a lot less energy.