Several years ago I looked into importing LED Lamps from China into the EU as a business and exchanged some emails with manufacturers in China and analyzed some samples of their products.
Basically they compete on price and hence advertise for bulk purchasers the version of their product with the cheapest power converter they have, which is quite crap. However if you pay them a bit more (back then it was maybe 10c for a good LED light bulb that costed less than $1 from the factory) they’ll use proper power converters.
As a consumer and if you’re buying no-name brand lamps you can try and get the one with the better power converters by buying “dimmable” LED lamps (even if not using a dimmer) because to get the LED lamps to react properly to the effects of a dimmer in the power that’s fed to them, the lamps need to have the better power converters (that do proper AC-DC with voltage step down conversion, rather than the sort of shortcuts used for the cheap converters).
errer@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I have a whole bunch of ceiling bulbs (19 of them) that I replaced with LEDs. In 3 years, 7 of them have died. That failure rate is comparable to incandescents. Unfortunately the sockets are kind of an odd socket type (BR30) that only a few brands make. I would really like to know which brands I can actually trust but I’m afraid the answer is likely “none of them.”