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Good question!
First, a little about me: I’m not a lighting engineer, but I’ve been testing and reviewing light bulbs for CNET for more than five years now. This includes hundreds of hours in our home lighting lab — a climate-controlled room equipped with spectrometer and an integrating sphere allowing us to conduct the most scientific and accurate light bulb tests we can conduct. I also visited and wrote features for major North American lighting manufacturers such as Cree and GE to better understand their methods and standards. This is one of many LED buying guides and summaries that I try to update as often as possible.
A peek into our integrating sphere.
We load every bulb we test into the center of our integrating sphere — a large, hollow ball with a special reflective paint coating on the inside. Our spectrometer peers through a small hole in the side of the sphere with a “barrier” that blocks it from looking directly at the light bulb. Instead, the light from the bulb bounces around inside, allowing our spectrometer to make reliable, calibrated measurements for things like brightness and color temperature.
We log these brightness measurements every 10 minutes for 90 minutes, then take a final reading at the end. At this point, I plug the sphere’s power cord into various dimmer switches, then measure the average maximum and minimum settings in all of them, while watching closely for flicker or hum.
Once a bulb we test is ready in the lab, we take a close look at things like light distribution, tone, and color quality. Our photo and video team (Tyler Lisenby, Chris Monroe, and Vanessa Salas here in Louisville) are a huge help at this point with standardized photography that allows us to take a closer look at these metrics. They’re also damn good at taking pictures of light bulbs.
All that said, the most important thing isn’t what I think when I take readings in our lighting lab—it’s what you and your family think after you screw in the bulbs and turn them on in your living room or other area. As I said, LEDs like these are designed to be durable and waterproof and last for years, so it’s worth buying ones you’ll really enjoy. You have a lot of good options these days, so there’s really no need to compromise. I’m simply here to help you find those “just right” bulbs a little faster – or more efficiently, you might say.
This new LED floodlight from Sylvania isn’t yet available outside of California, but it’s efficient, putting out 93.7 lumens per watt. This will be one of the next bulbs I review.
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