full circle

[solarbird]

I know this is a weird thing to go off about, but I opened a new box of LED light bulbs and kinda freaked out because of old, old muscle memory.

At left is an old incandescent bulb I still have. At far right is the brand new LED. All the bulbs are in order of age/purchase, from ancient incandescent to the first reasonable-light-quality LED to an improved middle version (still quite heavy!) to a nice plastic bulb from last year.

The two on the edges are glass.


They’ve finally pulled off exact replacement. The texture and even the weight are right. (I checked; the LED is 3g heavier but I can't tell that just holding it in my hand.)

They've finally done it. It's so weird.

Full circle.

Wow.

Comments

[armiphlage]

Wow!

[arethinn]

I learned in some article about GE splitting apart into several supposedly more focused sub-companies that they had stopped manufacturing light bulbs last year. That may sound like a weird thing to go ".......huh" at, but I did.

[solarbird]

You never know what's gonna be a "whu?" moment.

[sistawendy]

Maybe the boomers will quit whining about them.

[solarbird]

I had one start whinging at me about one flickering and I talked about how I had some incandescents that did that and they were grumbly and I'm pretty sure it was because I had just pre-empted their "real light bulbs didn't do that" speech.

[dewline]

I've had flickering issues, but I'm inclined to think that I'm putting the fixtures through more stress per day than was expected. Maybe I'm wrong.

[wrog]

I am sort of wondering why they bothered. It seems like doing the glass blowing is a lot of pointless extra work when they could just have the raw LEDs hanging out there (especially for fixtures where you can't actually see the bulb...)

[solarbird]

Well, 1: Pretty sure bare circuitry is never UL approved, 2: point light sources are not well-liked! People generally prefer a more diffused source, particularly at higher lumen levels. The brighter, the more diffusion people tend to like in indoor lighting.

For me, the surprise is the change from plastics to glass.

(People who do like exposed LEDs tend to like the LED "filament" bulbs, and I have a bunch of those. But that, too, is a kind of diffusion - as opposed to point source.)