I've been buying various brands of CFLs in the U.S. for about 5 years, and
initially, they seemed more problematic than they might be worth.
The early ones were slow to attain their full brightness, colors of light
were yellowish and reddish, and typically failed within a year.

The CFLs that I've found to provide "good" lighting, are the daylight or
sunlight versions (various brands).
Most of my lighting in living areas have fixtures that orient the lamps
base-down, and the result is bounce lighting from overhead and adjacent wall
surfaces. This type of lighting is very agreeable to me, and I don't
particularly like to have a lamp shining directly onto something I'm looking
at, unless I'm trying to get a close look at something within a piece of
equipment.

Placing a cool or soft-white CFL near a 6000 degree daylight CFL, with both
lighting a white wall, should reveal a very different color of light coming
from the cool/soft lamp. The cool or soft-white CFLs were making many colors
appear to be different in my comparisons.

Early on, I was glad to discover that CCD and digital camera devices worked
very well with the higher light temperatures of 5000+.
Around 6500 degrees works very well for my eyes and camera images, in my
experience.

In the workshop, I found that the light from cheap workshop/garage
cool/soft-white fluorescent twin tube fixtures was slightly uncomfortable
(for my eyes), and that issue was fixed by also having a few regular
incandescent bulbs in the work area. The result was an improvement but not
as good as sunlight CFLs (for my eyes).

--
Cheers,
WB
..............


"Arfa Daily" wrote in message
...
As if any more reasons were needed on top of their horrible startup
characteristics, their ugliness, their sick coloured light, and their
inability to last for a fraction of the claimed lifetime :-(

Like most of us, I suspect, I have hundreds of component drawers, which
over the years have become mixed up and confused, so in the circumstances
of work being very quiet at the moment, I decided to have a major tidy up
and clear out of redundant components. As a first move, I decided to
rationalise the resistors, and re-store them by individual value, rather
than in groups of values in the same drawer.

Now the other day, the bulb in my Anglepoise bench light failed, and as it
was the last 60 watt pearl one I had - nowhere stocking such an animal any
more due to EU ecobollox intervention - I put in a CFL that had come free
in a cornflake packet or some such nonsense. Once it has warmed up in the
morning - at least one coffee drinking time needed for this - it seemed to
work reasonably well. Until, that is, I started trying to identify the
resistors in my old drawers to move them into the individual value drawers
in the new location.

The spectrum from this lamp is so poor and discontinuous, that it is
almost impossible to resolve red from brown from orange, or violet from
blue or grey. Absolutely bloody useless. If I can't find any more 60 watt
pearl bulbs on the 'net, then I'm going to modify the lampholder to take a
low voltage halogen downlighter bulb, and hook it to a 12v transformer.

Arfa