Thank you. This has been bothering me for years. I’ll stock up on good ones for the house remodel!
Comment on I need a flicker free LED lightbulb running in the 3000 K range.
quixotic120@lemmy.world 5 days ago
All LEDs are flicker free on dc power and they all flicker on ac power so what you’re looking for is an led bulb with a good quality internal dc power supply. Unfortunately many, even those advertised as flicker free, don’t meet this requirement, because they’re built cheaply.
This also depends to a degree on your eye sensitivity. My vision is poor but I can clearly see the difference between 30 and 60 fps whereas some of my friends and family don’t seem to notice such a thing. I don’t know if that’s similar but I’ve had experiences where I’m like “these lightbulbs are flickering” and other people are like “no they arent” and I then question if I’m potentially mentally ill or my eyes are possibly worsening even further (although thankfully sometimes other people notice too).
To oversimplify it it has to do with the rectification of the power supply and constant vs switching current dc power supplies
You can verify this by taking a high quality slow motion video of the bulb at least 240fps. I have some clips but they won’t upload.
Basically a hue white ambiance doesn’t flicker. This meets your requirements as it is adjustable between 2200k to 6500k. However, these are expensive and frankly I wish I never bought them because philips changed the terms of service after sale. I bought into their “ecosystem” years ago and I only run smarthome stuff on my local network but they are pressuring users to move to “philips security” which will require your lighting to be connected to their servers 24/7. This is apparently going to be necessary in a future update. A workaround is the bulbs do work with z wave but that requires additional hardware/software, plus why support a company that pulls such bullshit
A second video I have shows that as hue bulbs age they do begin to flicker though it is hard to see/perceive for some time. This is not a criticism of hue and more just something to be aware of with led lighting, the power supplies will begin to weaken and fail over time. Thankfully this takes quite some time, the bulb I have is approaching 8-9 years of life. But considering the price that’s not necessarily a great price per year (although keep in mind they’re regularly on sale). The flicker is mild
A third video shows a cheaper no name bulb that was marketed as flicker free. My partner says they are not bothered by it so it’s in their office but I can’t stand it. The video shows a much more dramatic flicker.
There is this website which verifies this for you, bulbs listed are either truly flicker free (category a) or imperceptible flicker (category b):
flickeralliance.org/…/flicker-free-light-bulbs
This post is brought to you by autism
picnicolas@slrpnk.net 5 days ago
Fuckfuckmyfuckingass@lemmy.world 5 days ago
Beautiful comment, I love it.
Also: “pressuring users to move to “philips security” which will require your lighting to be connected to their servers 24/7.”
Is the most unhinged boring techno dystopia shit I’ve read. It’s a goddamn light bulb, kindly fuck right off with that shit.
f43r05@lemmy.ca [bot] 5 days ago
The service is free, for now. That will change when they have a bunch of ”pot committed" users signed. Then it will be "to continue providing our amazing services, and the cost of underlying systems (CEO & board member pay raises) it is now #only# 3$ a week.
quixotic120@lemmy.world 5 days ago
It doesn’t matter if it’s free. Fuck that. Your iot shit should NOT be on “cloud” servers. I love having automated tech shit in my house, it’s great, but it’s 100% not worth having if it can’t run offline
My one exception is if it needs an initial authentication online and then can run offline forever. Lutron caseta is an example I will endorse, the product works extremely well. Never have drop outs, unresponsive devices, etc. it does require an internet connection to activate a device initially but after that it can run on an isolated vlan with no internet access indefinitely (I have verified this)
Philips, like so many other iot providers, will likely skimp on cybersecurity. Why should I trust them to potentially sync my address, my lighting schedules, information about the layout of my house, etc? Further they will absolutely harvest my data and sell it. If not initially then eventually. Fuck all of that. The best option for security is to air gap all my iot shit and not connect it to the internet at all. If the vendors don’t respect that then I don’t respect them. Either I’ll hack it to make it work, find a workaround, or sell it. Either way I’ll make sure I shit on them online every chance I get because I’m so goddamn tired of corporations stealing our autonomy as consumers
Highly recommend home assistant btw. Only voice assistant you can actually run locally and only voice assistant you can actually have autonomy over. It’s frustrating that the choice is a more feature filled product like alexa, siri, or hue versus home assistant or a pure z wave bulb but the former always robs your autonomy. They either fill the space with ads whenever possible (alexa), don’t allow you to customize the assistant and control your data (siri and alexa), at any time will change the tos to revoke api access (chamberlain, mazda), force server sided bullshit (hue), etc
adarza@lemmy.ca 5 days ago
of course they wanna charge you. they’ve been purposefully fucking with incandescent light bulb lifetimes for a hundred years as a means to increase profits.
they can’t do that anymore, so they need another racket to get you to keep coming back and giving them money…
and they found it.
just like every other greedy bastard corporation—subscriptions.
at least they aren’t gimping the led units to some arbitrary lifespan, but you know damn well they’re using the cheapest shortest-lasting sub-components and cheapest manufacturing they can find.
Dasus@lemmy.world 5 days ago
I’ve had Philips Hue for like 6-7 years now I think, I only registered a few weeks ago when I bought a new phone and wanted to get all my all configurations to my new phone without much hassle. I don’t mind them being connected as there’s no cameras or sensors on them and I’m not looking to buy any of their sensors or anything.
Also I trust EU regulations to be such that Philips can’t deprive me of basic functionality on these. Also also, the scripts for these were rather simple, to the point that despite me not having touched a single line of code for like 15-years, and even before that only having done it for some courses, I could easily manage a script to manage them.
Just took a clip at 240 fps, no flickering. Reading the earlier post I was like wondering about flickering, because I’ve never had any as all my bulbs are Hue Colours.
quixotic120@lemmy.world 5 days ago
Eu regulations won’t save you when someone hacks philips servers and all of the data they’ve stored on you is captured by malicious actors. And whoops, it turns out they stored a ton more than they needed to, your address, your lighting schedule, how many rooms are in your house, names of users with access to your home, etc. and whoops, turns out they did the bare minimum to secure their servers and hacking them was basically as simple as knowing how to hack things
So terrible! What will the eu do! Be really mad at them and 8 years later sue them for 70 million dollars, which is 5% of their operating revenue. They will surely learn their lesson and definitely not continue doing the exact same thing without changing at all. But they’re really mad at them! And they can’t stop you from turning off the lights! Nice! Also they harvested all that data above and sold it to advertisers to make back the 70 million (and then some) so it didn’t even matter they got hacked, your info is easily available for like 24 cents
They definitely don’t flicker though until they’ve had a significant amount of use. But there are a lot of comparable bulbs for much cheaper that don’t cost nearly as much. Not all of those are “smart” though, but you can combine them with a smart product that’s much more consumer friendly (like lutron caseta) and then you’re good to go. Or just get a z wave bulb if you want a bulb that can do things like change colors/temperatures. Fuck philips, fuck compulsory “cloud” services”, and fuck the regulatory bodies that have utterly failed us because they simply don’t understand tech beyond basic connectors (or they’re paid not to, I guess)
Zpiritual@lemm.ee 5 days ago
The domestic appliances division has been sold to a chinese-controlled investment firm in 2021. Guess when this push started…