Nova Light Shop — Home LED Bulb Selection | novalightshop.com
The CRI ladder from 0 to 100, the flicker check, and the five printed values to read on the package.
The colour rendering index runs from 0 to 100 with 100 as the ideal. Many LED bulbs sat near 80 in 2019, commercial blue-pump phosphor LEDs cluster around 82, high-CRI products exceed 95, and LEDs with CRI below 75 are not recommended for indoor lighting. Treat 80 as the floor for general rooms and 90+ where colour matters.
Badly designed LED lamps may flicker, and the extent of flicker depends on the quality of the DC power supply in the lamp base. Longer exposure to flickering light contributes to headaches and eye strain, so the driver electronics matter as much as the LED chip.
On narrow screens, swipe or scroll the plate sideways.
A practical pre-purchase check: record a slow-motion video of the lamp and look for banding. A lamp that bands on camera will band on a dimmed circuit, and dimmer incompatibility is a common flicker source.
Then read the package itself. Lumens tells you the brightness against your room's target from the lumens-per-room calculation. Watts tells you the running cost at about 100 lm/W for typical white LEDs. Kelvin tells you the colour band. CRI tells you colour fidelity on the 0–100 scale. Rated hours tells you longevity: 15000 hours is the typical domestic figure, about 15 years at 3 hours a day, and 50000 switch cycles; the best LED lamps offer 30000 hours or more.
Finally check dimmer compatibility and damp-location suitability if the fitting calls for them. Energy Star requires less than 10% lumen drop after 6000 hours, which is a useful benchmark when two packages quote similar rated hours.
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