As most of us probably did, I grew up with old-fashioned incandescent light bulbs. A year or so ago 6-packs of white, “daylight” compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs) were on sale at Costco so I bought a shitload of them, like 12 boxes, practically a lifetime supply (they were seriously dirt cheap, like $2.50 a box).
Problem is, I find the white “daylight” color they emit just isn’t what I’m looking for in an artificial light source. The familiar amber/yellow-tinted incandescent bulb light is what I’m used to and what I like. The white CFL light is okay, I mean it performs its function perfectly well, but I want the old color back.
Do they make CFLs that emit that old-school color? And is there anything I can do to make my white “daylight” CFLs more resemble that old color, like can I put gels around the bulbs or something?
The problem is that the CLFs are line emitters, like any other fluorescent light. This is in contrast to incandescent lights that are close to black body emitters. What this means is that there isn’t a broad swath of wavelengths lighting you, rather a small number of intense thin bands of light at different wavelengths. Filters don’t do what you want or expect with line emitters, so fixing what you have isn’t really feasible.
As to creating lamps with better colour, there is no CFL that really gets close to black body. The tri-phospor ones are better than the really cheap ones, but still a long way to go. As while LEDs use a phosphor to get the light white, they are also line emitters, and have much the same problems. We still await broad spectrum and efficient light sources. They are coming, but not just yet.
I also hate the “white” CFLs. The light they emit makes me want to hang myself. I’ve discovered that if I use the bulbs with a color temperature of around 2700K, they approximate the light of incandescent bulbs fairly well.
Probably could do something with theatrical lighting gels – no worry about fire from them. But it’d be a lot of work and makeshift, I’d think. I would be inclined to sell them at a yard sale (or donate them to an organization) and use the cash to buy new ones – they’re probably even cheaper now.
Just echoing, you want to look for bulbs with a 2700K temperature range. They will also usually say “soft white” on the package. I bought some GE bulbs awhile ago that are soft white and they do give off a pleasing yellowish glow similar to that of incandescent bulbs.
As Francis Vaughan states, fluorescents emit strong wavelengths of light in narrow color bands, where an incandescent bulb emits light along the color spectrum like almost any other radiating black body (red-hot iron, the sun, fire), and offer a true, rich color temperature with a bias from deep crimson, to warm yellow, to blue and white-hot. So that the color of the glow depends on its temperature.
it’s been my personal WAG, that CFLs are stuck in the “uncanny valley” of light. We can get close and approximate the “color” of an incandescent bulb glowing at about 2700K, but it’s a trick by mixing certain phosphors or what have you so the wavelengths of color they emit add up and mix to the same sort of “white balance” you might get from a typical 75 watt bulb.
But it’s a hack. There’s nothing like the richness and innate warmth as to how an incandescent glow will light up a room, and after how many millions of years of primates and humans evolving toward the warm glow of fire and the sun, we can spot a fake like we can spot a CGI face.
I continue to buy incandescents, besides I think it goes deeper than “it’s what you’re just used to”. It’s the light we evolved to.
I bought a “daylight” bulb once, to replace in a torchiere floor lamp. I flipped it on and had to turn it right back off. It was awful, and made me feel - angry. I thought that feeling was a fluke, and tried for a couple of days to try it again. Every time I went to another part of the house and then came back to where I could see that blue-white light, I felt angry again. Couldn’t take it, and exchanged it for a regular CFL, which I think are fine and close enough to incandescent.
Indeed - I bought some really shitty (I should have known better) Chinese ‘corncob’ lights comprising about 100 white LEDs arranged around a cylindrical body (hence the name ‘corncob’). They must have had really narrow output bands - because the light units themselves were too bright to look at, but many non-white objects in the room hardly seemed illuminated at all - I guess because they weren’t the right colour to significantly reflect any of the output from the LEDs.
I suspect that might be part of the reason they give people a bad vibe - the apparently-bright, familiar room suddenly contains many new pockets of darkness.
Ugh, “Daylight” fluorescents are horrible. Off the top of my head, I think they run at an ice-blue 9100K or so.
The best stick fluorescents (eg: 48" tubes) I’ve seen are the “Spec 35” type. IIRC, they’re a fair attempt at full-spectrum light at 3500K. So far, nobody seems to be using those phosphors in CFLs.
As for LEDs, a lot of them have an unpleasant shimmer to my eyes. I was driving along a boulevard where the trees had been draped with “white” LED lights, and the flicker as I drove past was a bit distracting.
indirect lighting (reflected) can be much better for CFL and LED in many uses. also diffusers can help. details on how are going to change with each environment and light source.
For CFLs, you really, really want to make sure you look for “Soft White” bulbs. They’re usually a reasonable approximation of incandescent light. “Cool White” or (God forbid) “Daylight” bulbs will make you feel like you’re waiting in line at the DMV. Or are in Hell. Or are waiting in line at the DMV in Hell.
I don’t buy it. Our eyes have only 3 types of color-sensitive receptors. The only way we perceive color is by the ratio of signals from those 3 types of receptors. There is no way we can distinguish between a true blackbody and an approximation made by mixing 3 colors.
As Lumpy states, it’s all in how other objects absorb and consequently reflect any incoming light back. Color perception is already a very complex thing, but limiting the full color spectrum to get white light, can have drastic and subtle consequences in how objects reflect that light back.
Just because the white-balance comes very close to 6500K by mixing only blue and orange phosphors at very narrow bands, an apple will reflect back this limited spectrum in an unnatural way as opposed to natural sunlight or a filament of tungsten heated up white-hot. And so forth.