Gadgetory

a CNET right wrist here and I've got the Cree TW series LED lightbulb to look at today this is a 13 and 1/2 watt bulb that's made to replace a 60 watt incandescent and it does a good job of it it puts out 800 lumens compared to the 880 you'll get from an incandescent so it's plenty bright enough now this bulb comes on the heels of Curry's original LED bulb which was a nine and a half watt bulb that put out the same amount of lumens so it was actually more efficient that bulb is 1297 at Home Depot you can get it a little cheaper in some places because of energy rebates it is Energy Star certified which helps and that's a great deal that bulb is a very tough act to follow so this is their follow this is their attempt at it and what they've done is they've made a very strong effort to increase the CRI which is the color rendering index of the bulb and that's why this bulb has kind of this bluish hue it's got a little bit of a tacky feel to it and all of that is part of an effort to make it better at rendering colors now the CRI score which runs from 1 to 100 being the best is 93 on this bulb and that's the highest score you'll find for an LED that's commercially available right now unlike the 1297 bulb before this bulb cost 1997 so what are you getting for that extra seven bucks well you're getting more accurate colors and is that worth it depends on what you need I wanted to test out just how much of an effect this had on colors so I look for the most colorful thing I could find in the office here and that turned out to be a bowl of Fruity Cheerios which we were actually using for vacuum cleaner test fitting now we're gonna light this bowl of cereal using just the Cree light to see how nice it makes these colors look and then for comparison we'll do the same thing with a basic standard 60 watt incandescent bulb so I'll go ahead and I'll take the Cree bulb and I'll screw it into this apparatus here and we're gonna hold it up above let's go ahead and kill the lights so here we have the Cree light and only the cria light illuminating the cereal and as you can see the colors do look a little bit more vivid in my opinion now here we have an incandescent bulb this is 60 watts this is the comparable bulb to the Cree this is the type of bulb you'd replace using this crea light and we're gonna hold this up right above the cereal just like before let the filament stop wobbling there a little bit and just like that we see that it looks fine you can see it you could eat this bowl of cereal in the middle of the night if you use this light but the colors might not look quite as vivid as the Cree looks and this is because the incandescent is not going to be as accurate at rendering colors as the Cree TW series so the question is is that worth it is that worth seven dollars more especially if you are sacrificing a little bit of the energy efficiency of the bulb for most consumers I think that efficiency is probably the top priority so I would recommend the previous cree LED bulb but if you want that high CRI if you want accurate colors if you're displaying artwork and you have a lot of need for that type of bulb this is a fabulous bowl you'll be very happy with it Kristina I'm right Chris