"William Sommerwerck" wrote in message
...
I just looked on my favourite lamp buying site in the UK, and they don't
appear to do any standard lightbulbs except ecobollox types at all now.
Even
the halogen ones that Phil mentions, now don't seem to be available. I
have
one of those in my hallway, and it is superb. They are basically a
halogen
capsule bulb, inside a 'standard' lightbulb. The one I have is a pearl
type,
so nice even light, but I seem to recall someone saying that even those
had
been made available only in a clear glass outer shell, and now it looks
like
that has gone as well. It really ****es me off actually, that yet another
mature technology that gave good even and diffuse light - the whole
reason
that that pearlisation of the envelope was introduced in the first
place -
has now been forcibly replaced with an ecobollox product that doesn't
hold
a
candle (pun intended) to what it's replacing. I wouldn't mind if the end
justified the means. I read the other day that it has been calculated
that
in the UK, if every single conventional lightbulb was changed for an
ecobollox type, all it would save is the output from one small power
station.

We're been through this before.

British CFLs must be of very poor quality, because you can get excellent
ones in the US. They come instantly -- faster than incandescent -- and
have
good color balance.

I've replaced all but the miniature "decorative" lamps in my condo with
CFLs. I would never go back to incandescent.

I'm writing this in my den. The light is from a 100W-equivalent Home Depot
CFL in an IKEA shade. The /only/ way you can tell it's not incandescent is
by looking under the shade.

The bathroom has a 6-bulb "bar". The middle bulbs have been loosened so
they
won't light, and the end bulbs replaced with CFLs. Yeah, it looks a bit
funny. Big deal.



Well. 'looking a bit funny' might be fine in your home, but it's not in
mine. Light fixtures are part of the decor, chosen as much for their
appearance, as for their lighting function, and I would like to still be
able to get the proper bulbs for them that their designers intended to go in
them. I don't want candle bulbs that are half as long again as the 'real'
thing and stick out of the shades, or convoluted spirals that look
ridiculous in open or glass shaded fixtures. I don't want to go to the local
store and be presented with 96 different bulb types, all vying with one
another to try to tell me what their equivalent power rating is. Even this
is shortly to be replaced over here with yet another piece of nonsense to
try to cover up the poor light output performance of them in comparison to
incandescent types, and that is to start rating them in "Lumens". But they
can't even agree on how that is actually measured, so a bulb with a lower
lumen figure could actually be subjectively brighter than a 'similar' one
with a higher quoted figure. 'Colour balance' is also a fairly meaningless
term. No matter how they mix the phosphors up on them to try to improve the
CRI, the spectrum never-the-less remains discontinuous in comparison to that
of an incandescent bulb. This is true no matter where they are sold or
manufactured. U.S. bought ones are no different in this respect to U.K.
bought ones. Contrary to what many Americans seem to think, the U.K. is not
a technically-backward banana republic.

Maybe you can't see anything wrong with them, and they suit your eyes, But
they are no good for me on both counts. I, and many others both here and
over there, *can* see their deficiencies, and don't like them. As indeed
prompted the OP to make his post ...

Arfa