Saturday, February 4, 2012

Both LED and CFL have good color in test

Over the years I have been disappointed when buying LED light, but not anymore. Here I have compared CFL and LED as sources for light above our kitchen table.


The light bulbs I have been testing, left to right:
Osram Dulux Superstart Micro Twist 2500K 11W 650lm CFL 10000h 7000on/off Hg=1.4mg 93x42mm
Parathom  Classic A 40  Warm White 3000K 8W 345 lm LED, 
Megaman LED Classic LG0408dv2 2800K 8W 420lm LED 25000h  118x60mm, dimmable 100-10%

I tried one light bulb at the time. My impression using just my eyes was that the CFL had a warmer color and somewhat stronger light than the two LED bulbs. The LEDs gave a very good white light, not like some of the ones I have tried before that was either too blue or too green. My eyes did not manage to see a color difference between the 2800K and 3000K, but so did my camera.

For the pictures below I used my cellphone camera set at a fixed daylight or lightbulb setting. So when the sheet of paper in the picture is white, the color is what the cellphone expect for its setting of lightbulb or daylight light.  All the light bulbs are warmer than daylight, and it is also possible to see the difference between 2500K-2800K-3000K.

 
2500 K CFL white balance: lightbulb
2500K CFL white balance: daylight
2800K Megaman LED WB: Lightbulb
2800K Megaman WB: daylight
3000K Osram LED WB: light bulb
3000K Osram LED WB: daylight

I walked over to our neighbor, that have a dimer on their kitchen table light, to test the Megman LED that is dimmable. With the particular dimmer they had I managed to dim the light only a little perhaps 100-70%. Not all dimmers work well with dimmable LED lights. Megaman have a good catalog, Professional Lighting Solutions, that explains a lot of different aspects of LED lights. It can be downloaded from http://www.megamanlighting.com/download-centre