(no title)
mdip | 8 months ago
A few months ago I went through most of the bulbs in my house and replaced nearly all of them with LIFX bulbs. I had spent quite some time trying to figure out which bulbs would have the least flicker and knew from my more DIY setups[0] that PWM frequency is the cause.
I deal with Migraine somewhat regularly and PWM flicker/strobe lights amplify the pain when I'm dealing with one.
Nearly every smart bulb I've grabbed incorporates such a miserably slow PWM setting that dimming the bulb to 1% results in lighting that's reduced by only about 25%. It becomes clear when you set it to 1% that the manufacturer couldn't limit length of the "off" cycle further or the bulb would begin resembling a strobe light.
I haven't tested all of the more expensive variants, but I also had a really hard time finding any "from the manufacturer" information about the PWM frequencies. I've also never encountered an incandescent drop-in that uses anything other than PWM frequency (I wasn't even aware that there are fixtures that do that).
[0] Experiments? Magic-smoke generators? Sometimes-almost-house-fires? I'm no electrical engineer.
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