Gadgetory

am seen attract Chryst when you're buying a light bulb your options typically boil down to incandescent fluorescent and LED but the finally light bulb is a new option that wants to give you an alternatives now before you get worried that there is a fourth light bulb category to keep track of keep in mind that this is actually more of a fluorescent than anything else inside you'll find mercury and other fluorescent gases that interact about electromagnetic electricity in order to produce the light that's really the same thing that a CFL does just it gets that electricity to the gas in a different way the benefits of that approach is that the finally light bulb can promise to last 15,000 hours that's longer than the five to eight thousand hours you'll get with the CFL but not as long as most LEDs that can promise up to twenty five thousand hours it's also not quite as efficient as an LED it uses 14 and a half watts to put out a state at 800 lumens most LEDs nowadays are well under 10 watts to do the same thing the big claim here though is better light quality and that's where I begin to have some problems with this bulb first off it's not quite as bright as advertised we clocked it at 589 lumens an hour integrating sphere and that's well underneath the state at 800 lumens we've seen similar problems with brightness and other fluorescent bulbs we've also seen poor color rendering scores and a finally bulb wasn't much different if you look at this picture of an appetizing looking bowl of M&Ms lifts by the finely light bulb you can see that the colors all look kind of muted and the whites kind of yellowed out it's not a great result especially when you compare it to a 60 watt incandescent you can see the whites a lot better there the colors pop a little more and it's brighter overall now the finally light bulb does get some things right with color quality especially when it comes to skin tones we tested this out by holding my hands in two separate compartments of our light box that's a 60 watt incandescent on the right and the finally on the left you can see that it looks very similar the hands both looks nice the skin tones get complemented by the light and the reason for it has to do with the way the bulb is emitting light now if you look at this graph this is a very wonky looking graph but bear with me now an incandescent and an LED will produce a graph that's a smooth sloping line the fluorescent lights we test all have these kind of spiky graphs and those spikes are all the different gases in the bulb that are interacting the electricity to produce light that specific parts of the wavelength so you get a spike for magenta a spike for greeny a big spike for yellow all of that adds up to the way the bowl looks with the finally bulb you can see that nice healthy spike in magenta that's very helpful for skin tones you can also see that spike in the invisible infrared part of the spectrum that tells you that the bulb is trying to sort of enhance the way Reds pop that spike isn't gonna make the bulb any brighter but it is going to make red to look a little better so it does do something's right with color quality overall though I just don't see the value here this is a ten dollar bulb and you have to taste shipping as well there are tons of LEDs that cost less than that right now including dimmable ones you can't dim this I say stick with those unless finely lowers the price for more check out my full review at cnet.com and field your light bulb questions to me on Twitter for CNET appliances I'm right