In article , PaPaPeng wrote:
On Thu, 23 Jun 2005 23:02:57 GMT, "Dr. Rastis Fafoofnik"
wrote:

There ARE some good CF lights out there.....but stay away from "Lights of
America" as they are ****-quality too...
SNIP

Sounds like the ones I bought at the Dollar Store. Probably same
China manufacturers, different box label. Didn't last long. Didn't
like the light spectrum. I'll stick to "warm" tungsten lights. Even
ordinary flourescent lights make my eyes squint and tire quickly.

In my experience, dollar store compact fluorescents are worse than those
by Lights of America, and I am one of many who have complained about
Lights of America and complained much less about other brands and I even
found many compact fluorescents that I like.

Most dollar store compact fluorescents in my experience have a color
like that of the bluish "daylight" standard fluorescents, or even slightly
more blue than that, even if the package says "soft warm white light" or
"Sun lighting". Even many actually "warm white" dollar store models I
found to have a less attractive purplish color and subpar color rendering
properties.

In my experience, all dollar store compact fluorescents overstate their
light output, both in terms of "incandescent equivalence" and also in
lumens in the few cases they do so. The least-overstated dollar store
compact fluorescents in my experience do this almost as badly as the
most-overstated compact fluorescents other than dollar store models. The
most overstated dollar store ones in my experience exagerated light output
by a factor of more than 3. One exception: One that did not make a claim
stating light output.

Sample size: 13 "brands", 29 "models", approx. 50 units tested.

There are better ones. Most spirals 19 watts or less (incandescent
equivalence 75 watts or less) have decent to excellent reliability, and
color very much like that of incandescent. I have yet to have any bad
experience in terms of reliability of any model by Philips or Sylvania,
and had bad reliability experience with only one GE model (which I have
not seen in a few years).
Non-spiral screw-in ones by Philips and GE have good color, although I
consider these very slightly harsher than that of most spirals 19 watts or
less. Most Sylvania screw-in models I find a little harsher still, with a
slightly pinkish shade of "3000K". However, I like their 3500K
("daylight" but actually what I call a "semi warm white") 13 watt spirals
- although this whiter color may appear "dreary" unless lighting
conditions achieved with these are truly bright (with a desk lamp or in a
room with several of these).
Non-spiral screw-in models by GE, Philips and Sylvania I have found to
have good reliability, even ones with light output fully matching that of
a "standard" 100 watt incandescent.

I mention more in my compact fluorescent pages linked from:

http://www.misty.com/~don/cfx.html

- Don Klipstein )