Originally Posted By: Dignan
Originally Posted By: DWallach
... Cree LR6 yadda yadda.

One day I'm going to have to think about those. We have a TON of recessed lights in our house, so it would be a significant investment to replace all of them, but I'd imagine there would be pretty great cost savings. Although, most of ours are dimmed most of the time they're on, so there's a little savings there. How is the light from the LR6? Like their regular bulbs?


They're an older and more expensive design. You can see from the heat sinks, alone, that they mean business. Rated service life is 50,000 hours, versus 15,000 hours for many A19-style LED bulbs. There are several ways you might talk about the light quality.

Color temperature: pretty much spot on at 2700K, versus some halogen reflector bulbs I have nearby. The halogens are a hair more pink-ish and the LED bulbs are a hair more green-ish. (I.e., same color temperature, slightly different hue).

Color quality: these LR6's are rated with an 80 CRI. That's not as good as many of the newer lights, but Cree also offers better CRI on its newer lights. One clever thing about the Cree is that, inside, they've got more than one LED color and apparently there's a feedback circuit to adjust the red-to-blue balance to ensure that the output light quality stays good even if the light is dimmed or as it ages.

Visibility: the Crees have a fancy system of diffusers and such between the LEDs and the front of the fixture. This means you never see sharp points of light from the individual LEDs. The overall feel is very much like what you'd expect from a traditional frosted incandescent bulb.

If I were buying today, I'd shop around at the various alternatives in the same space. I'd also probably get some "100W-equivalent" rather than "60W-equivalent" lights. I have two of the former and most of the latter. There are a couple places in the house where more light would be sometimes useful.

One last bonus of the Cree parts: they're "damp rated". You can stick one right above your shower or outdoors under your entryway.