Some people seem to have different memories than I do of what it was like buying lightbulbs before LEDs came out. I remember incandescents also having a variety of color quality, lifespan, and decorative options. I remember having the choice between bargain bin bulbs and luxurious options, making sure to outfit a room with a single brand so everything looked the same, realizing it's more difficult to read with this one or that, keeping receipts in the box in case they don't live up to the "double life" (2000 hours!) branding, the annoyance of having a regular bulb in a 3-way lamp, or a faulty circuit causing lights to flicker, not to mention the fire hazard of having something too close to an exposed bulb.
Things are not so different now. As it was then, we still have crappy products with too little information and too much marketing. Having CRI ratings on the box is a good change (a spectrogram would have been nice though), I think it cuts down the trial and error it takes to find something suitable. What I don't like are all the built-in specialty lighting sources. More and more we're seeing fixtures with custom LED panels instead of sockets, which often means more expensive trial-and-error when it turns out that expensive "dimmable" ceiling light is doing PWM at 60 Hz, or when it dies one year out of warranty and you have to change the entire decorative housing instead of just replacing a bulb. The good news is that it's easier than ever to ask strangers what worked for them, and it's still less expensive to find and buy high quality LED bulbs than it is to use incandescents.
I do have different memories than you about buying lightbulbs. I remember thinking 60-watt bulbs are frustratingly dim, 75 watt bulbs are a minimum, but what I really wanted every time was a 100 watt bulb, it just improves visual acuity tremendously. And my frustration with LED and flourescents, etc is that I can't find the equivalent of my good old 100 watt bulb; whatever the new rating systems are, it's all an excuse for "it's a little dimmer"
(don't get me wrong, I like dim lighting, I prefer it, I don't turn lights on when I get up in the morning, I make coffee, I take showers in the dark, people come into spaces that I'm in and always snap the lights on and it drives me crazy. I'm simply saying, when I want to turn a light on to see, I want it to cast a good amount of light.)
(oh, let me add on, I also know that 1 tiny little blue or white LED power indicator on each of a few gadgets I buy seem able to bathe my bedroom in light when I'm trying sleep.)
It's really not that hard to find 15w LEDs with CRI95+. 15w will be approximately equivalent to a 100 watt bulb. A quick Amazon search pulls up multiple options.
Recently I even got out the big guns and bought this thing, mainly to replace my halogen floor lamp. It's 40w, and more like the equivalent to a 250w incandescent, though it is awkwardly ginormous.
15W should approximate a 100W incandescent bulb - but IME it's hard to find 15W LEDs that do; I've tried several (at a variety of price points), and none were as bright as the 100W.
I ended up buying adaptors that turn a light socket into two sockets. Then you can achieve something approaching 100W, or better, with a couple of averagely dim LEDs.
>>"I like dim lighting, I prefer it, I don't turn lights on when I get up in the morning, I make coffee, I take showers in the dark, people come into spaces that I'm in and always snap the lights on and it drives me crazy."
Man, My brother is a constant light-stepper (he always has on harsh, too bright, lights even when he is not in THAT room, or if he falls asleep.
It drives me nuts!
STOP TURNING ON FLOURESCENT TUBE LIGHTS AND FALLING ASLEEP!!
I recognize the visual acuity, but I cannot stand tube-FLs at all - and while I have every single bulb in my house an addressable RGB LED Alexa bulb (Feit Electric) -- there are certain lights I cant replace (a few ceiling fans with integrated LED lights, tube lights in certain spots, etc) -- I have learned that the position of the lights is also important.
For example, if the kitchen tube light is on, it lasers-into the corner of my eye if I am sitting on the couch at night and the kitchen tube light is on. I cant alexify that just yet (the alexa light switches require a 3-phase (meaning the requirement of a ground wire) to mount -- my house was built in 1959 and the wall switches do not have the req ground wire....
but yeah - its interesting how sensitive you become to the lighting environment once you pay attention to it.
When I was doing architecture, I was always wondering why we paid "lighting designers" so much... but after working with them, and working with lighting in my own home, I am amazed at what they accomplish with lights.
i had a similar view, until i found COB LED stripes (with dimmers), with 20W per m (LED W, not equivalent, i have mounted a few of those 3-10m (!), and now can have dimmed 1% background lights and hospital style brightness as well.
I've had good luck finding 100w equivalents at my local big box store. Only in the bright white color format though which looks terrible indoors. So those get used on outdoor fixtures and in my utility room and garage.
Fortunately, my home has plenty of overhead lighting and a few lamps, so 60w soft white bulbs are sufficient for the other rooms in the house.
I had been unaware of measurement according to "moles of photons", though I suppose it's not surprising. I've never really understood what a mole is other than "we decided to pick this number as a constant multiplier when doing small calculations".
Per wikipedia[0], there's a vaguely defined unit, the Einstein, which may be defined as the energy in a mole of photons. (The vague definition being because each photon may have different amounts of energy, and thus an Einstein would be some weird function in order to describe total energy.) Wikipedia suggests using measures of Photosynthetically Active Radiation (PAR)[1], like Photosynthetic photon flux (PPF) instead. I suppose this is because PAR is literally defined to measure according to "what plants crave", but it also allows bounding the "total joules of energy" above and below by the PAR wavelength limits.
It's very important in chemistry to deal with molecular weights and convert them into usable masses. You could try to deal with uholy powers of 10, but mole makes everything easier by turning 1 molecular weight into 1 gram.
I'd been dealing with flickering CFL bulbs for some time already. My fovea is about 10hz slower than the rest of my retina. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 58hz versus 68hz (70Hz CRT displays were a goddamned revelation for me, when I could finally afford them. Thank you Iiyama.)
Things flickering in the corner of your vision is distracting af.
But then my partner started complaining about headaches reading, but only in certain rooms in the house. I put two and two together and stopped buying a brand of CFL (I might have upgraded to LEDs at this point, I don't recall).
More recent advice was to go to the hardware store and record a slow motion video of the demo bulbs, to see if you can detect flicker during playback, but I think I've only succeeded in that one time and so I'm not sure if it doesn't work as well as advertised or if retailers have gotten better vendors.
Philips has "SceneSwitch" bulbs which are NOT 3-way lamps, but sort of approximate the 3-way behavior: When you toggle the power off and back on again within <1s, they'll cycle between bright, medium, and dim. (With color temperature becoming lower as you dim.)
I've made these my standard lightbulb for any non-dimmable lamp/fixture, so pretty much every light in my house can be dimmed now.
(Any fixture attached to a dimmer gets Philips "Warm Glow" bulbs, which also get warmer as you dim them, and which do a good job of filtering out flicker.)
Things are not so different now. As it was then, we still have crappy products with too little information and too much marketing. Having CRI ratings on the box is a good change (a spectrogram would have been nice though), I think it cuts down the trial and error it takes to find something suitable. What I don't like are all the built-in specialty lighting sources. More and more we're seeing fixtures with custom LED panels instead of sockets, which often means more expensive trial-and-error when it turns out that expensive "dimmable" ceiling light is doing PWM at 60 Hz, or when it dies one year out of warranty and you have to change the entire decorative housing instead of just replacing a bulb. The good news is that it's easier than ever to ask strangers what worked for them, and it's still less expensive to find and buy high quality LED bulbs than it is to use incandescents.