Philips AmbientLED Energy saving indoor flood light 046677410285 12W PAR30L Soft White; Dimmable
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Bright,"crisp", lighting...
I replaced five 60W halogen incadescent flood with this model LED. These are in our kitchen area, and are frequently burning brightly although no one is actually in the room. I am hoping the expenditure will pay for itself in savings. I chose the non-diffused design of the bulb as I prefer the sharp, crisp look it provides. I've tried CFL's and LED flood with a diffuser cover on it, but I don't care for the lighting effect it provides. The first words out of my wife's mouth when she saw the bulbs in action were "It looks like a spaceship!". Yes, you can see the individual points of light from the LED's. But they provide that look I'm after. The color of light has just a hint of more white than what I'm used to seeing with the halogen bulbs. But I think I like it more, and it's definitely not the cold, "blue" white color often seen in LED's. I like them, I recommend them!
27 February 2013
Disappointing performance
I was looking forward to eventually replacing my CF bulbs with LEDS, but this one doesn't yet offer much advantage. It lasts 3 times as long but costs 3 1/2 times as much, so the purchase price doesn't save any money.
I was hoping it's efficiency would make up for that, but, at 12 watts, it's only slightly more efficient than my 14 watt CF bulbs. This may be because it wastes a lot of energy as heat. Like my CF bulbs, it gets too hot to touch. Maybe the LED technology will improve over the next few years, but it's not yet the leap forward I was hoping for.
Having said that, I'm very happy with how well it dims. My "dimmable" CF bulbs are terrible at dimming -- they cut out at about 60% brightness. This bulb dims almost as much as an incandescent bulb, dropping to about 10% or so. The package said that I might need to install a more modern dimmer, but my (10 year) old dimmer handles it just fine.
However, it doesn't work well in my living room track lighting, which requires some of the lights to face people. The 10 LED spots are way too bright to be comfortable. If would be more comfortable if it had a disperser. The light beam is narrower than my CF spots, which I suppose is what we should expect from spotlights, but it doesn't work well in my setup.
The only other advantage is that it doesn't use Mercury, which is more of a disposal issue, but one that I appreciate.
Overall, this is a great improvement in dimmability, but is otherwise not much of an improvement over CF bulbs.
14 June 2012
