Gadgetory

I am seen that's right Crist here with the second gen Cree BR 30 LED floodlight now this is a new bulb from Cree that takes the existing BR 30 floodlight and adds some subtle improvements and cuts the cost down from twenty dollars to ten dollars that's a pretty significant cut that first gen bulb was more expensive than all of these good competitors you see here and the new version the bulb cost less than them now if I turn the bulb on here you can see it's got a nice yellow eat glow at 2700 K you can also get a version with a wider color temperature of 5000 K for a dollar more it's a little brighter than last year's model about 50 lumens brighter at 700 lumens or so and it's also more efficient it's got a power draw of nine watts as opposed to 9.5 watts before now those are pretty incremental steps forward it's a very slight improvement over last year's model but again that price is half of what used to be so I like that a lot however it also has some of the same weaknesses as last year's bulb last year's bulb wasn't very good at dimming it flickered a bit on the dimmer switch as we tested this one had the same problem as flickered goes it's definitely very light but if you're a stickler it might bug you last year's bulb was also not the best in terms of heat management and this bulb is almost the exact same you look at this graph shows how the light levels off after about an hour so you can see that the two cream olbes that red line on that blue line are perfectly mirrored right there at the bottom that's not a bad result anything north of 85 percent at that steady-state is a good result but other bulbs like the GE reveal and the green Creative Cloud LED did a lot better something else of note is that along with cutting the price in half Cree cut the warranty in half last year's bulbs gave you 10 years of coverage this bulb only gives you 5 that's still good but not as good as before so if you like that long-term protection you might be disappointed although you'd have to be happy with the fact that this is the cheapest major manufacturer of floodlight on the market today and run out the home depot and grab one right now for 10 dollars that's as lower prices you'll find I like that a lot because if you need a bulb like this you probably need more than one you probably have a lot of recessed fixtures in your home need to upgrade a whole bunch of bulbs and a low price point is gonna be very enticing if you have dimmer switches maybe consider splurging on the GE reveal BR 30 LEDs I couldn't get that just flicker no matter how hard I tried but this bulb is still pretty good from basic lighting setups and worth the cost for more check out the full review at cnet.com and hit me up on Twitter with any light bulb questions you've got we're seeing that appliances I'm right Chris