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Comment by chem83 | Hacker News Reader

While I'm a die-hard LED bulb consumer for its obvious longevity and efficiency advantages, I always wonder whether their seemingly invisible flickering messes up more with my well-being than the lack of light temperature and light brightness controls would. Would be nice to see some research on this.

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Wave a knife around in your kitchen with flickering lights. You'll see that the effect is not invisible, but an edge case. Just like with flickering LEDs on vehicles, you can't tell right away exactly where the vehicle is. Just having a flickering light on the edge of your peripheral gives you the same alert feeling when an object is moving fast near you, such as a fly. Also, flickering room light probably interferes with rendering of moving objects on a computer / TV screen (though the effect would be subtle and the bugs in the computer would drown them out).

Since when LED bulbs flicker?

A lot of cheaper ones do half-wave rectification on the mains voltage, so they flicker at 60hz (or 50hz). Slightly "better" ones will do full-wave rectification but no smoothing, so they flicker at 120hz (or 100hz).

A crap ton of decorative "Edison-style" bulbs have this cheap or non-existant circuitry in them. Buying from Amazon is a huge gamble. I have slow-mo video of disappointing lights.

The quality bulbs will power the LEDs from a smooth DC voltage and not flicker.

Exactly this - in age of most decent phones having no issue recording 1000fps videos, just record one with your lights. Heck even 240fps is enough. Suddenly those nice lights may not seem so nice anymore.

I wouldn't be surprised if this has some quiet smallish long term negative effect on our brains and eyes. In same vein as 24fps-is-enough-for-everybody was a lie

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