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Interesting article at Business Insider on why we don't like LED bulbs:
There's a handy trick for reading station signs that otherwise fly past in a blur as you travel in a high-speed train. Look at one side of the window and then immediately at the other side of the window. When you change your gaze, your eyes will automatically make a rapid jerking movement, known as a saccade. If the direction of the saccade is the same as that of the train, your eyes will freeze the image for a split second, long enough to read the station name if you time things right.
Saccades are very fast movements of the eyes. Their exact speed depends on the size of the movement, but large saccades can move the eyes at the same rate as a high-speed train. The image of the station name becomes visible because it is travelling at the same speed as the eye, and the images before and after the saccade are blurred and so don't interfere with the image of the sign. This shows us that our vision is still working when our eyes move rapidly during saccades.
Scientists used to think we could see no more than about 90 flashes of light a second but now we know it's more like 2,000 because the eyes move so rapidly when we change gaze from one point to another. During the eye movement, the flicker of light creates a pattern that we can see. And this has some surprising consequences for our health thanks to the way some types of lighting can affect us. In particular, it could discourage people from using more energy-saving LED lightbulbs.
Most lighting is electric and powered by an alternating current supply, which makes the bulbs continually dim and then brighten again at a very fast rate. Unlike filament lamps and to a lesser extent fluorescent lamps, LEDs don't just dim but effectively turn on and off completely (unless the current is maintained in some way).
The answer is not to make them less piercing?
(Score: 2) by zocalo on Saturday July 29 2017, @08:37AM (8 children)
It doesn't make much financial sense to skimp anyway; besides being cheaper to run, LEDs last an age when subjected to typical usage patterns and given a decent power supply, so you've got to ask is that extra few bucks in your pocket *really* worth the extra years of visual aggravation?
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 2) by choose another one on Saturday July 29 2017, @09:58AM (1 child)
> And the moral of the story is: don't skimp and get cheap-ass LED lights.
Not as simple as that, I've paid a lot for top (supposedly) brand LED bulbs which have flickered and failed in a month, and I've had cheap chinese no-name imports last for several times that (still failed in under a year though).
I've now settled on mid-price ones from the local supermarket, which work and are still working after a year. I think volume and returns is actually the key, no one is going to send the cheap chinese imports back to china, and the volume on the expensive brand ones isn't going to be high enough to redevelop failing ones, but if they're on the shelf in the supermarket they are high volume and people are going to return them if they fail inside a month. Interestingly it seemed to take the supermarkets months/years after incandescents were banned to actually get LED bulbs on the shelves, possibly because they were making sure they had some half decent ones...
(Score: 2) by zocalo on Saturday July 29 2017, @11:45AM
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 2) by VLM on Saturday July 29 2017, @01:03PM (2 children)
Many man-years of EE work go into making the heatsink small enough that it burns out at a maximally profitable 2-yrs or whatever.
You COULD make a LED that runs "forever" but the mfgrs profit is usually ensured by carefully engineered poor heatsinking to cause rapid failure.
There are also weird Asian beliefs or whatever. For example Asians love incredibly bright blue LEDs, most people do not. So I have a HDMI switch with blue LEDs that can almost illuminate a room, and they did that by over-driving the LEDs such that they're burning out after a year. You can't shove 50 mA thru a 20 mA LED forever, although it'll work very brightly for awhile. Likewise I would not be surprised if Chinese made LEDs are optimized to make stir fry colored food look good, not so much bangers and mash (I don't even know what that is, although a UK coworker claims to eat it... hopefully not some obscene joke at my expense)
(Score: 2) by zocalo on Saturday July 29 2017, @02:42PM
No, bangers & mash isn't a joke. It's a traditional UK dish of the working classes - e.g. cheap, filling, quick to prepare, reasonably tasty, and not especially healthy - consisting of mashed potato served with sausages, colloquially referred to as "bangers", fried until the skin has split (I assume the use of "banger" to refer to a sausage comes from the popping noise they make when the skin splits as they are being fried). It's normally prepared with sausages flavoured with added herbs such as as a Cumberland sausage, and served with gravy and fried onions. Additional veg. may also be included; most typically peas or beans. Condiments are typically salt, pepper and HP sauce, although some heathens with have it with ketchup. Incidentally, if you want to pep up the mashed potato, add some chopped chives into the mix; sometimes referred to as "Champ" - CHives And Mashed Potato. It's not a dish that's going to look particularly appealing under brightly coloured LED lighting.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 29 2017, @10:50PM
WRONG!
(Score: 2) by frojack on Saturday July 29 2017, @07:43PM (2 children)
Where would you see both?
Entire continents are one or the other, not both.
I'm guessing you only actually use 50HZ.
I have nothing but LEDs in my home, (ok a couple seldom used CFLs left in odd places), and I never see any flicker.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by zocalo on Saturday July 29 2017, @08:38PM
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 2) by moondrake on Saturday July 29 2017, @09:36PM
Actually Japan uses both. 60 Hz in the south and 50 in the north IIRC. If you are close to the border between these areas, you might need both....