Price Of Lightbulbs

[Huge]

I'm afraid the only stupidity being displayed here is yours.

[Huge]

How do you take into account such matters as having to replace light fittings because CFLs won't fit in them and the fact that the output and lifetime figures are lies?

[Huge]

Plus £20 for a new fitting which a 25W CFL will actually fit into.

[ARWadsworth]

>>>

I suspect people will always manage to do that. When I was at school I remember a chart in a geography book showing the expected drop in energy usage as appliances got more efficient.

And if you budget for the fact an energy efficient lamp takes 4 times more energy to produce than an incandescent lamp (I have no figures for disposal costs) the gap between the two gets smaller.

Adam

[unopened]

I would expect the cost of production to be reflected in the cost to the purchaser. The most recent CFLs I bought cost me 68 pence each. Now, they may have been subsidised, but the end result is that they are not that expensive these days. I even got some 'free' from my electricity supplier. Those are useless to me - I would have preferred an equivalent reduction in my electricity bill, as I will have paid for their administration, source of the (useless) CFLs, postage and packing in my electricity bill.

As for disposal, most people will simply chuck them in the household waste to go to landfill or incineration. Whether they should is a different matter, but without an adequate infrastructure for their proper disposal, that is what will happen.

Perhaps what should have been put in place is a deposit scheme on CFLs, such that returning unbroken ones got you (say) a pound back, and a returning one with a smashed tube got you 50p - anyone supplying CFLs having to participate in the deposit scheme.

Sid

[dennis]

Everyone's colour perception is different anyway so absolute accuracy doesn't matter much to most people. You only have to look at the way people set their TVs to know they don't care about accuracy at all.

[dennis]

Rip off.. they were/are five for a pound in Homebase.

[Andy Champ]

You need a better LCD. Colour rendition might be suspect, response time slow, but they are so much sharper, and that is what really matters for text.

Andy

[fictitious]

>>

Which is what is going to happen now that a source gil-tec.co.uk...has been found .

[Tim S]

dennis@home coughed up some electrons that declared:

But are they any good?

I bounght some 15W ones for less than a pound at Tesco's and the are totally rubbish - quite yellow and dim - not much better IMO than a 15W pygmy bulb, so in other words a total waste of shelf space.

The 20W 5 quid jobbies I bought online are many many times brighter and actually white. Although I did have to get two replaced as they were flickering... It's about time CFLs were marked with some universal light output standard because the wattage means bugger all IME, apart from how warm they will get.

Cheers

Tim

[Tim Downie]

That would never do. It would mean giving useful information and having to reveal how much they've lied in the past about CFL equivalence.

I was mucho peed off when Which? did a test of CFLs but didn't look at this most fundamental aspect of the bulbs they tested.

Tim2

[Dave Plowman (News)]

The sharpness of a CRT depends on the number of dots per inch and the bandwidth of the electronics. As well as it working correctly, of course. If an LCD is sharper, you're not comparing like for like spec wise. But as regards text my old CRT was better than this LCD running anything other than native resolution. But then this computer uses anti-aliasing for text.

[Dave Liquorice]

All the ones I have looked at have the light output stated in lumens in the small print along with the cap size, voltage and current.

[Dave Liquorice]

An ordindary office type LCD here, HP L1706. Much better than the iiyama CRT it replaced. Same nominal screen size 17" the LCD does run at it's native 1280 x 1024 where as the CRT was 1024 x 768 but it is still much sharper. Always run an LCD at it's native resolution to get the best from it.

The CRT had loads of tweaks for barrel, pincushion, trapeziod etc distortion and convergence but I could never get it right in all four corners at the same time. The LCD has no distortion, convergence or purity errors anywhere.

The LCD is stable, the CRT would take a good half hour to stop drifting if trying to do anything photographic. The colour matching between a displayed photograph and one printed via Photobox is excellent on the LCD. The CRT was close but couldn't reproduce a full gray scale without crushing the blacks or clipping the whites.

Same computer, same video card, same driver suite. Just changed the monitor.

[Andy Champ]

Are you seriously telling me that on a CRT you can get linearity, collimation and pincushion adjusted at all points on the screen to less than 0.1% error?

I have never seen one that good. All LCDs are.

Andy

[The Natural Philosopher]

well running at native is what you MUST do with an LCD. Anything else is horrid. Then adjust the display size of what you are displaying for comfort.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

I'm sure the paper specs will be better - they always are. Not the same as perceived, though. And the lack of a true black is something an LCD can never cure. Plus the different gamma in the backgrounds.

[Andrew Gabriel]

I use a very nice, but now quite old HP 20" LCD monitor, which cost me a fortune 5 years ago. Mindful of its probably limited life (I'm already on a replacement under warantee, which is now expired), I do occasionally look at what's on the market now. One disappointment is they've all gone widescreen. For a computer monitor, I much prefer the height advantage of 4:3, as I have at the moment.

[tinnews]

So why would you do anything but run the LCD at its native resolution?

Whatever, my Dell LCD is sharper than any CRT monitor I have ever used including a number of relatively esoteric monochrome ones.

[Steve Firth]

That's umm complete bollocks. The best that I've seen in studio CRTs is distorted in one plane. All others show pincushion distortion. The best CRT display that I used was the Radius Blue which was designed for proofing colour print. It had a dark hood to reduce the colour interference from reflected light (off clothing etc) and it was TBH still crap as far as distortion goes and the colour range was no better than the current LCD monitors sold by Apple.

Appeal to an unidentified "graphic designer" is obviously so convincing. As I said, if he hasn't noticed the distortion of his CRT and as I didn't say, if he hasn't noticed that the phosphors on his CRT have aged over the last 8 years then he's not the all-conquering colour expert

*you* claim him to be. And FWIW I worked in broadcast TV in the 1990s so I've had experience of calibrating and using Trinitron studio monitors.

Gamut makes perfect sense in this context, look it up.

ollocks.

No, gamut is a term widely used in any work involving colour reproduction.

Maybe if you stood up, your voice wouldn't be so muffled?

Luddites hold onto technologies long past their sell by dates.