A “few” search improvements that would bump this from ‘marginally useful’ to ‘very useful’ for me:
Have a way to search for bulbs that are able to put out some value in a provided range of color temperatures. (E.g. searching for 1900-2700K would give you a bulb that produced 1950K, a bulb that produced 2600-3500K, etc.)
Have a way to select what color temperature the other data is based off of (in particular, CRI can vary widely depending on selected color temperature).
Have a column for Melanopic/Photopic ratio (and maybe a second for the driver peak frequency. GaN tends to be around 460nm-ish but it varies somewhat, and other LED techs do exist). Be aware that there are multiple definitions of this (linear scalings of each other). I’d just pick one and stick with it.
Have a column for if the bulb is rated for enclosed fixtures / humid environments / installation upside-down / etc.
Have a column for weight. This is a half-decent proxy for how decent the bulb heatsinking is, at least until bulb makers start Goodharting it.
Have a column for max observed bulb temperature. This is a half-decent proxy for bulb longevity.
Have a way to hide / show columns.
Add color coding to e.g. lumens too. Colors are far more easily glance-able than text.
It’s getting more difficult all the time to find ‘decent’ LED bulbs. By which I mean the niche I’m looking for is getting rapidly legislated out of existence. I’m starting to shift towards LED strips as a result, but standalone LED bulbs are still useful in many situations…
Probably a dumb question but I’ll ask anyway, of the different criteria you measured, which column should the average user organize by, to find the “best” bulb?
One question that seems to pop up a lot in regards to smart bulbs is how low they can be dimmed.
People need to find those that can be used in a night light setting.
Hard to say… right now it’s more of a DB for comparing lights apples to apples. So if you want to see which of two lights has better RGB gamut, you can do that, for example.
Or which ones have better white tolerance (aka black body deviation)
I haven’t developed a metric to give each light an overall score yet.
Personally I gave up on Lfix because it so difficult to read the code on the bulbs, even with glasses. I have 8 Kasa bulbs that work fine with no flickering.
So, it all depends on one’s experience.
This database looks extremely useful - it has all the sort of engineering data I like to see!
What’s the easiest way to tell which lights would be decent quality(judging by eye strain, and impact on sleep?) Ie - I see you suggest TrueLight Luna, but what if we want automatic control?
edit: I’m now reading around on your website, if you have not already talked to the Chroma team, I suggest you do so, they get extremely into the weeds about light and the impacts of it on human biology.
I agree with you.
I got so tired of trying to read serial numbers on laptops, pin descriptions on ESP boards and even english manuals for Chinese products, where they seem to have a goal to save paper but printing in so small a font that any insurance firm would be envies.
I bought a micrscope: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005006828228939.html
RGB bulbs often aren’t controllable natively through an RGB tuple, but might instead use e.g. HSV, with a separate colour temperature mode for controlling white light.
Here’s some examples from the lights in my house (as reported by HA):
TP-Link LB130:
• Color Temp, HS
• 2500-9000 K / 400-111 Mireds
Shelly Duo:
• Color Temp
• 2700-6500 K / 370-153 Mireds
Shelly Duo RGBW:
• Color Temp, RGB
• 3000-6500 K / 333-153 Mireds
Shelly RGBW2:
• RGBW
• (No Color Temp)
Magic Home (Corner Lights):
• RGB
• (No Color Temp)
Yeelight (Xiaomi Mi):
• Color Temp, HS
• 2000-6535 K / 500/-153 Mireds
This is important, because if your set a light’s settings via Home Assistant using a foreign mode, then a conversion formula will be used which can lead to inaccuracies.
wish I could remember my old HA login…