led lights suck

led lights suck. they're all too harsh and spastic and they hurt my eyes. their vibe is 💀. is all that energy they're supposed to save making a difference? no. all new car headlights are instruments of torture. fuck led lights. this thread is for negative led light content only. thank you.

Try to find the ones marked "soft," not "daylight." Daylight is harsh, soft is what you want.

Bright LED headlights suck, though, especially as so many cars (SUVs/Compact SUVs/trucks) are tall, so the beams go right into your face.

the soft ones are ok but i miss tungsten light!

it looks like you can still buy tungsten lights just fine? i thought they were banned or something.

my bedroom window is in direct view of someone's porch and last year they put in a motion-sensitive led porch light that is like 1000 gigawatts. i have to draw the blinds at night (i like going to sleep with a view of the dark tree branches in my yard) and even then the fucker shines through the drawstring holes in the blinds right into my eyes. i have to build a pillow shield to block it.

have you tried speaking to them about maybe using a less bright bulb? people can be totally oblivious about the effect they have on others, but willing to be nice when they find out it's a problem.

we had recessed lighting installed in the living room of my in-laws' home a few years ago and it was initially set to the highest possible setting, which they said was what most people wanted. it was like being in Target, just these blinding blue white lights, i felt like i was on the surface of Vega. we insisted they soften them, and they did (grudgingly) but it was still bad. i really enjoy the slight amber hue of old school lights. maybe just a wistful memory of driving thru chicago streets at night as a kid, and all the streetlights were sodium vapor yellow, and i associate the harsh blinding white lights of today with how everything has to be flattened out and bereft of character or subtlely. all the cars look like shit, interior design is a dead zone, lighting is garbage.

It drives me nuts when I go somewhere that has nothing but super bright LED bulbs, usually the daylight ones. To me it's like people that don't turn off motion smoothing on their TVs. Like, you know this can look better, right?

By tungsten you mean incandescent? I dunno if you can buy them still, maybe only certain types? All I know is that when we moved in to where we are now back in 2014, we put in LED bulbs and honestly haven't yet had to change more than a couple of them (which may have been defective; they've gotten cheaper and better since then). Pretty sure they did reduce our power bill, too. We have one bulb on one switch that sometimes flickers a little, even when it's technically off, because the minimal energy to power the little green "active" dot on the switch is enough to power the bulb itself a tiny little bit, it's that efficient.

Some negativity for you: they swapped in LED bulbs in the streetlights here, and sure, they last longer and they make things safer/brighter, but they fucking suck. I sleep with a mask on now, because the blinds don't block enough. On the plus side: boy do I sleep well with a mask on.

Maybe I posted about this on here in the past, but so much of that lighting (and yeah, also cars and a lot of the other blandness or sheer ugliness of contemporary physical environments) reminds me of the part in 1984 where he takes out his secret stash of before-times stationary and marvels over how creamy the texture of the paper is, etc.

Oddly just enjoying & learning from this piece of relevant content yesterday:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oy7BrKNmZAQ

I think I said this elsewhere here, but IME LED lights do not last any longer than a normal bulb, at least, the indoor lightbulb types don't seem to.

I still buy tungsten bulbs but they're usually 'novelty' bulbs... My nightstand lamp is yellow, for instance

here in the Bay Area, there's an incandescent light bulb that's been on for over 100 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centennial_Light

all the streetlights were sodium vapor yellow, and i associate the harsh blinding white lights of today with how everything has to be flattened out and bereft of character or subtlely. all the cars look like shit, interior design is a dead zone, lighting is garbage.

YES you get me. i miss sodium vapor lights so much. seem to recall that there were similar lights on outdoor buildings that had a blue-ish tint too? not sure what kind those were.

have you tried speaking to them about maybe using a less bright bulb? people can be totally oblivious about the effect they have on others, but willing to be nice when they find out it's a problem.

― more difficult than I look (Aimless), Tuesday, December 9, 2025 10:49 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

this is the sensible thing to do, that i totally won't do lol. every few nights it's off and i treat it like a little gift. it's honestly nbd, i was exaggerating a little for comic effect. i should try a mask tho, j-in-c got me curious.

led lights on all our appliances and devices etc. do we really need those little pinpricks of unpleasantness to tell us when something is 'on'? i have an air purifier below said bedroom window that i run at night. the touch-surface controls are on the top and it's all pretty obvious what does what and you can 'hear' when it's on or when you switch from high to medium to low etc. yet there are like 5 led lights on the thing! in the dark of the bedroom it lights the space up like a little mini christmas tree.

i am curious if anyone has encountered any devices that ... just don't do led lights. like has any brilliant designer ever realized that they're mostly unnecessary and unpleasant in our living spaces?

I put my mask on during my 3:30AM piss

I am low light mood-lighting person. I even paint some of my incandescent lightbulbs with orange/amber glass paint to make them warmer. I'm ok with warm LED bulbs (<2700 k) over my kitchen work spaces, but that's it.

I'm fortunate not to have a neighbor whose lights shine in my window at night

in the dark of the bedroom it lights the space up like a little mini christmas tree

I just went around my apartment putting small bits of post-it notes over such lights (the glow still shows but is diminished) and it's made a huge difference at night.

haha i've done that before with masking tape!

I even paint some of my incandescent lightbulbs with orange/amber glass paint to make them warmer.

i love this. maybe i'll make a winter project of replacing all of our led bulbs with incandenscents and painting some of them. we are kind of stuck with horrible fluorescent lights in our kitchen unfortunately.

I use Deka transparent glass paint on my incandescent bulbs, which I get from Flax (SF/Oakland), but it is also sold elsewhere. When you light them there is some initial burn-off with a smell, but the bulbs last just as long as any others. The effect of them is magical

I've tried painting some of my remaining fluorescent bulbs, which works somewhat but not as well, the paint doesn't seem to stick. I recently went to the hardware store to replace a fluorescent bulb and was told that they are no longer sold

there are all these terrible bright as fuck LED light strips under the cabinets in the kitchen of our rental home, i turn them on and it looks like we're in the Aliens lab where they store facehuggers floating around in water.

so many contractors out here (and i'm sure everywhere) have defaulted to these absolutely artless, bereft-of-humanity style which is just harsh white everything and also gray colored vinyl faux-wood flooring. which is actually sort of what the floor is like in this house, we try to warm it up as best we can but the kitchen still is lit like Ridley Scott filming a chestburster scene. haha sorry I just saw these movies again.

I think the greatest effect of glass paint is when you use a transparent incandescent bulb and make sure the glass paint is also transparent. You can then place it in a metal Moroccan lantern that has perforations to create a magical effect of sharp points of light swaying on the walls. The Comfort of Strangers (1990) is a film that has inspired me in that regard

i am curious if anyone has encountered any devices that ... just don't do led lights. like has any brilliant designer ever realized that they're mostly unnecessary and unpleasant in our living spaces?

― map, Tuesday, December 9, 2025 7:49 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

some well-designed humidifiers and air purifiers have a setting to deactivate the led lights, it should be a standard feature for anything you might have running at night in a bedroom

man, the led lightbulb section is a whole aisle long in every hardware store because people have decided that pirate candelabra blackbody temperature lighting is the only acceptable hue. but all of these options are available. You can buy cheap led bulbs at Costco with a 5 way switch that changes the temp.

I think I said this elsewhere here, but IME LED lights do not last any longer than a normal bulb, at least, the indoor lightbulb types don't seem to.

This is wild, ours definitely do. Like, several years longer.

the LED bulbs that don't last long are earlier designs put in an enclosed enclosure where they can't dissipate the heat they produce. they die because of the heat. think recessed lighting like BR20/30 bulbs etc.

If I knew how to post a picture here I would. Many of you guys seem to do it easily but you have never clearly explained how you do it to me. Is is some kind of secret? I've tried imgur, tinypic, imgbb - no luck

xpost Those are exactly the ones we initially had trouble with, a handful in bathroom vanities specifically, but it's been years since we've changed one since.

i am going to let you all in on a little secret, which is that there is a very good LED light made by one company who owns all the good patents - soraa. they're not that big a company and they don't sell to retail. so you either have to go through a 3rd party on amazon/ebay or you have to find a commercial lighting company that only sells in increments of 10 and the bulbs cost $30 each. we have soraa track lighting and imo it's very good light.

waveform is another good company (they specialize in flicker-free bulbs) and i hear good things about yuji, but haven't tried.

one thing i really like about led lights is that they come in 3000k. i find incandescent bulbs (2700k) to be too warm and yellow but 3000k (also known as 'bright white') to be perfect. i agree that 5000k is terrible.

https://store.yujiintl.com/collections/yujileds-sunwave-redefining-full-spectrum-lighting

i'd like to try one of these bulbs.

the perfect lighting for me is like...Barry Lyndon

led lights spell danger

soraa is definitely the material scientist's nobel prize winning led light of choice.

GaN grown on GaN substrates. Pure GaN on GaN lighting.

"pirate candelabra blackbody temperature lighting", what?

also I don't think you can change the hue on an LED light with a any switch

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daUePvZpS7s

there's at least two led temps at the extremes that they mix with a circuit switch.

2700 forever

color switching and people being gaga over it is one of the many reasons why led lights suck

caek linked to an interview with the cinematographer for andor season 2, which included this interesting tidbit:

The latest breakthroughs are all in the LED light space. I used a lot of LED lights on “Andor”. All the lights are RGBW (red, green, blue, white), and you can choose any color you want. There’s someone next to you controlling those lights on their iPad, and you’re almost painting the scene with these controllable lights. You can control the color of each one, you can control the intensity of each one, and you can do it all in real time.

When I graduated, it was all with gel filters, tungsten lights and HMIs. Those lights were shifting their color as they aged, and it was a more time consuming process to tweak the colors. Now you have such fine grained control over LEDs, and it’s the biggest positive change for me in the last few years. Sometimes I still use tungsten lights, but my first preference is LED.

otoh, led haters will enjoy this article https://nymag.com/strategist/article/led-light-bulbs-investigation.html

i think it's unsurprising that retail LEDS kind of suck, but it was surprising to read this from the met (who presumably has the budget/wherewithal to source high quality LEDs). i haven't run into any of these problems but it's probably cause i don't have my lights turned on 24/7 like the met does

Metropolitan Museum of Art. Second floor, European Paintings, Gallery 614. I was standing in front of Jacques-Louis David’s 1816 portrait of General Étienne-Maurice Gérard, and I was gazing not at the depicted light falling on Gérard’s pale brow, or at the muddled play of clouds and gold in the sky behind him, but past the frame to the ceiling. Up there, mounted behind the glass of a frosted laylight, were rows of LED spotlights forming bright blurry circles. They should have been uniform. Some were white; others were turning a sickly magenta or green. The person who had directed my attention to them was Amy Nelson, the museum’s head of lighting design. “The quality of the light,” she said, “is just not what we want it to be.”

Nelson is in charge of the Met’s ambitious project to overhaul the museum’s lighting for the LED age — a long, piecemeal process that can involve anything from workers simply swapping out bulbs to architects and designers entirely rebuilding displays. Among the goals, Nelson said, is to eventually fill the museum with a standard white light — 3,000 degrees Kelvin, slightly crisper and cooler than the 2,700 of a soft-white incandescent bulb.

That was the theory. Now we were looking up at the reality of one of the Met’s early LED installations from the mid-2010s. “The galleries looked beautiful when they opened,” Nelson said. But the lamps had gone screwy. They were meant to have a life span of at least seven years, but even before that, their color had started to visibly decay. We walked on, through more of European Paintings, under still more fixtures that were shining past their point of practical failure. “It just looks like Christmas lights up there,” Nelson said.

What Nelson had discovered is that LEDs are not good or bad but more like weird. The finickiness reflects the fundamental nature of the product. The LED bulb is the shape of an old lightbulb, and it fits into a lightbulb socket, and it gives off light, but it’s not so much a lightbulb as a lightbulb emulator. What it is is a computer.

Where an old-fashioned tungsten filament can generally be trusted to be either intact or broken, the drivers and diodes inside the new bulbs are subject to the kinds of glitches and compatibility errors you get from other electronics, especially once dimmers get involved. They can crash or hang, or audibly buzz from electromagnetic interference, or go haywire from being fed the wrong kind of power signal.

LEDs, in other words, can be broken even when they appear to be working. “It’s still on. You still have light coming out,” Nelson said. “They don’t just fail or burn out like a halogen source does. Oftentimes, there’s light loss or there’s color shift.” When an LED bulb package says it’s supposed to last a certain number of years, that doesn’t tell you when the light will go dark. It’s a guess about an arc of degradation. The end date is when the bulb is estimated to be 70 percent as bright as it started out.

The impetus is on you to decide when things have started to look uncanny. “I wish that would be addressed by the industry — like, maybe if it reached a certain light-loss factor, it would just shut down, you know?” Nelson said. “Or if it shifted in color past a certain point, it went into failure mode.”

Earlier, in a gallery of ancient Chinese objects lit by halogens, Nelson showed me a Shang-dynasty bronze in a display case. When the setup was created, her designers were able to get focused four-degree spotlights to isolate items from their backgrounds. But lighting manufacturers are abandoning halogen as an obsolete technology, creating a shortage of reliable parts as they retool for an all-LED future. “Now, the tightest beam we can find is a 12-degree,” Nelson said. The bronze sat in a loose puddle of light, making the sides and back of the display as bright as the object itself, and stray purple rays spilled out of the halogens on the ceiling. “It’s very hard to come by quality,” she said.

In some places, newer and more finely tuned LEDs work magic. Nelson pointed out a Winslow Homer with watercolor oceans in stunning blues, brought to vibrant life even at the low foot-candle output required to protect the art. But not everybody, of course, has the Met’s resources.

And once you know what to look for, you can’t unsee it. A few weeks after I visited the museum, I watched a small ensemble of musicians run through new pieces by teen composers in a midtown studio. The facility was built 11 years ago, and the room still looked brand new, but when my eye went up to the ceiling, I could see the same color decay as at the Met. The shadows on the floor, pointing this way and that, were in pinks and greens. The light was coming apart.

Where an old-fashioned tungsten filament can generally be trusted to be either intact or broken, the drivers and diodes inside the new bulbs are subject to the kinds of glitches and compatibility errors you get from other electronics, especially once dimmers get involved. They can crash or hang, or audibly buzz from electromagnetic interference, or go haywire from being fed the wrong kind of power signal.

yes. this is related to the trend of computers invading everything and making things more complicated than they need to be. this isn't progress.

also, if you now have to have $$ to get high-quality light (from leds) that is .. very on-trend for 2025.

and sorry, i don't really find the pov of highly tech-enmeshed producers of digital moving images relevant when it comes to the diminished quality of light in every day life.

you're right though that i enjoyed that met article haha

in terms of lighting there's probably something related to how minimalist design aesthetic has been co-opted and ruined to the point where so many projects just look like dystopian office parks. and that includes homes. i used to walk by this house every night and it was this big place with nice property, and through the big front window you could see the entire interior illuminated by bright white almost fluorescent-type lighting, and this giant huge big screen TV that was constantly on, someone sitting there playing first-person shooter games. really depressing shit.

also, if you now have to have $$ to get high-quality light (from leds) that is .. very on-trend for 2025.

― map, Wednesday, December 10, 2025 12:21 PM (fifty-seven minutes ago)

kinda, but as someone who does care about how my living space looks (just like you) i view it as an upfront investment. so the soraa bulbs i have run at 9W, and they replace halogen track bulbs (installed by previous owner) that ran at 50W. the light is a better temperature and because electricity costs are insane here in nyc, i end up saving a lot per money per year vs halogen. based on some simple calcs i think it'd take 2-3 years to recoup the cost in electricity over a halogen bulb, and i'm hoping they last a lot longer than that (i haven't had to replace any yet and i've been running them for over a year).

of course i could have saved even more upfront by just buying cheap ones from ikea but oh my god ikea bulbs are so gross, never get ikea led lights.

xp i feel like house flippers led the charge there, so many flipped houses where the flippers painted everything in super-blue white with contrast black tile, cheapest way to make something look eye-popping on zillow but it's so bad irl.

there's a lot of that occurring with flips yeah. and i think there's just this deadening lack of subtlety, how flippers and contractors just are increasingly less able to differentiate between what works and what doesn't. it's like how people want to have their own big fancy house so they buy a shitty mcmansion with a cookie cutter custom iron door that's ten ft tall, and the whole structure looks so cheap and flimsy and untouched by hands that are capable of craftsmanship, compared to older homes.

kinda, but as someone who does care about how my living space looks (just like you)

yeah, this makes sense, it's just that incandescents used to cost $3 for a pack of 6 or something, they all worked the same and they looked good.

i live in a trailer ftr so new construction and "track lighting" isn't really relevant to me and paying $30 for a fancy led bulb isn't either. cool that you can invest in that though.

if i had a million dollars lol i'd definitely be looking at 20s-60s homes instead of new construction. they're in better neighborhoods too ofc.

there's a tendency with computerized technology to .. liquidate quality control, so to speak. like the inequality of society as a whole is replicated in the new technology that's replacing the old technology. so if it works well or works at all, it's because you have the means to pay for it.

led bulbs can be bought for about a buck each. they can be bought in different color temperatures. they are dimmable. they last far longer. they use less power. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

interesting thanks for sharing

I had too many dead bulbs on my Christmas tree lights and couldn’t cannibalize from one strand to another to replace the dead bulbs as some wattage difference across strands made the replacements instantly die, so I junked the lot and replaced them with a long strand of LED lights.

The way they flickered in my vision as I was wrapping them around the tree was viscerally unpleasant, to the point where I felt like I was experiencing vertigo or that the light itself was triggering the sensation of deep, uncontrolled intoxication in my brain. It was extremely disorienting and I almost took the whole strand off and threw it away.

I did end up pushing through and the sensation went away once I wasn’t slinging the lights around the tree (I always put them on while glowing so I can adjust for maximum coverage as I go) but Jesus, it was terrible. I’ll also note it’s the first time I’ve done this while wearing glasses and I don’t discount an interaction between the light quality and the progressive lenses.

that's interesting djp, i experience something similar with certain car headlights or especially if they have custom led lights installed. a weird peripheral sensation and vertigo.

and yeah, i also wear glasses. though they aren't progressive lenses. i do seem to recall experiencing this feeling without my glasses on. i can also 'push through it' but it's surprisingly unpleasant.

There's only one place I like a really sharp, bright, LED light, and that's on the work light on my sewing table. But that light is at hand height, and it shines only down onto the table and nowhere else. I can't stand those super bright lights in my face. A few Christmases ago I ended up painting a 500-bulb string of Christmas lights with glass paint to get them to not stab me in the eye every time I turned the Christmas tree on.

Also, for reasons of globalisation, all new Christmas lights have gigantic car-battery sized plugs on them, which do not fit neatly behind or under any furniture, or they are battery-powered, which is worse. Christmas sucks now because of this.

I've written to our local council several times complaining about the incredibly bright LEDs on the pedestrian crossings in our area. The old, mellower lights marked out the crossings perfectly well, and they were dim enough that you could see people approaching the pedestrian crossing even when they were some distance from it. Now, the lights are so bright that everything else around them is pitch dark, so although I can see when people are actually on the crossing, I can't see anyone approaching the crossing on the footpath. This strikes me as pretty dangerous. Although obviously the council don't give a shit, because I've never even had a response.

And that's before you even consider the poor people who live right beside the crossing and have that blood light flashing in their eyes all day and all night.

Blood light? Eh, sure, why not.

btw, on car LED headlights, i'm in full agreement that they're very bad in the US but there's actually a reason for that (tl;dr the US was the only country in the world that banned the good tech until just recently)

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/blinded-light-american-headlight-safety-lags-years-countries-rcna82666

Better road illumination and less glare from oncoming traffic are both key for safer night driving, automotive safety experts say. Technology that can do both at once — known as adaptive driving beams — has been used in Europe since 2012, according to automakers, and today it is available in cars sold in every major automotive market worldwide, except the U.S.

A 2022 regulation allowed the technology in the U.S. for the first time, but more than a year later, no vehicles with it are available for sale.

At the same time, Americans may be experiencing more glare. In the past two decades, vehicle headlights have shifted from primarily warm-yellowish halogen to cool-bluish LED, which human eyes are more sensitive to. New vehicles are increasingly taller, making oncoming headlights more likely to be eye-level for drivers in small cars. And few states annually check for headlight misalignment, which can lift light into an oncoming driver’s eyes.

also, did you know that 11 states do not require car safety inspections at all?

https://i.postimg.cc/X7JywRG6/Screenshot-2025-12-11-at-11-14-25-AM.png

for me the commodification of cheap as chips (thanks again my true master Chairman Xi!) programmable adhesive LED strips, LED stick lamps or the bayonet lamp fittings that can be controlled by the WIZ app. This is game changing stuff for making cheap, easily adjustable *sensory areas* of the house for autist with specific sensory profile. It would have cost me thousands 10-15 years ago to install a similar set up. It probably would have required wiring in extra circuits with specialist light fittings ... etc..

Now you just get a programmable B22 lamp from B+Q for £12. And will get change out of £30 for LED strips and stick lamps.

there is a beauty to tungsten lamps I can understand. They were phased out in the UK so long now that most modern ceiling roses would probably melt because they aren't rated for heat of these old dogs. And also energy bills are so fucking expensive in the UK it's hard enough to be able to afford to power a couple of space heaters and powering a washing machine without adding loads of heat burning inefficient old-lamps onto the demand, even if they are superior.

i was paying more attention to car headlights on the road yesterday - the difference in quality is really wide. european cars tended to to be the easiest on the eyes - audis, bmws, that sort of thing. it seemed like they were designed to not shine directly in the line of sight of oncoming drivers.

Yes, we never had our cars inspected in Michigan! Still don't. I find it weird in NY.

All the LED under-cabinet and the ceiling cans (except they're not cans anymore I guess) that I put in my ex's kitchen reno had temperature switches and they worked great. I was SUPER happy with the under-cab ones on the middle or warm settings!

because electricity costs are insane here in nyc

Can I bring this up for a sec? I was talking to someone in the Bronx and her monthly elec bill was MULTIPLE HUNDREDS of dollars!!! Mine is and has always been between $70-110ish per month even with AC in the summer, for a 2-br place. Am I bugging???

think if you run AC in the summer yeah it'll be hundreds of dollars. i keep a spreadsheet of our electricity bill since it fluctuates and the price per kwH varies from $0.30 to $0.40 and usage varies from 200+ (in winter) to 1000+ (in summer with two wall ACs). fwiw the average price per kwh in ny is less than $0.20

I do run the AC in the summer. Usually not 24/7 for the whole apartment more like I make sure my room is cool at night and leave the door open if I'm working from home. The other bedroom also has a window unit and uses it similarly. Our summer high is still ~ $100! Our WINTER ELECTRICITY BILL is $60-70. I don't want to jinx myself but something has to be different. We have lights and a tv and computers and a microwave like everyone else. I...think our cost per kwh is 12.4 cents? We are getting relatively hammered with a service charge of $20 and a DELIVERY charge of $19.

"Supply 107.00 kWh @12.411¢/kWh"

you have cheap electricity! i dunno why. did your building have solar panels or something?

we get ours through our co-op and it seems average based on r/asknyc

Idk why either but definitely never had solar panels, and I migrated my account over from like 5 other addresses that I've lived in over the years but idk if the rates were ever changed based on locations. It's not like we read by candlelight.

Okay well that's my question answered anyway. I'll take a peek at the r/