I am thrilled to see some commercially available LED lamps come available, sadly my initial testing with them has been less than stellar. There are 3 or 4 entries by Lights of America brand that SAMS and Wallmart are beginning to carry, but they are all arrays of 5mm LED's which are historically problematic.
The first I purchased was the candelabra light, came in a pack of 3 for around $15 so the price was right. Another thing they got right was the light color. This lamp really has a very good "warm" which for a low output lamp. Not blue, but neither orange or yellow or green as many "warm" lights tend to border on. This light may have the best color temperature of any LED lamp that I've experimented with so far. It also generates enough light to actually qualify as a useful lamp, or at least useful in combination with multiple lights as you see it used in most fixtures. Unfortunately it has other problems.
Almost all of the light is directed upwards. It has special LED's which are designed to not focus the light, but spread it around more and they do to a certain extent, but by far the majority of light goes straight up still. Most candelabra fixtures have the bulbs pointing upwards so if I put these into my kitchen lamp they would light up the ceiling and not the table underneath it.
But by far the biggest problem with them is lumen maintenance. LED's when not properly cooled or just due to manufacturing shortcuts loose output over time. Most LED bulbs calculate their lifespan by the time it will take to reach 75% or some other percentage of their original output. This lamp stayed lit on my test bench for 3 weeks and in that time it reduced it's output to less than half of the original. So it went from almost usable to completely night light in a very short time.
The second lamp I purchased from them were some indoor LED floods that looks like plastic ice cream cones. I didn't even take their picture. The light color that comes out of them is blue. 6500k or even higher, or just blue. Completely unusable inside the house as far as I'm concerned. I didn't even bother to test lumen maintenance on them. I know that people in other countries tend to like cooler color temps inside more than we do in America for whatever reason, but these were not usable by me. I put them in some rarely used outdoor flood fixtures just to put them to use even though they aren't rated for outdoor use. So we'll let them languish out in the elements there and see how long they last.
Then they added another type, a more solid looking outdoor flood fixture. Still an array of 5mm LEd's inside but I had hopes that perhaps the build quality would be better than the all plastic model above so I bought one of these too. Higher price at $14 each, but worth it if they last and are usable. The light color on this one was better than the ice cream cone model, perhaps 5500k which is usable for a work surface, but you wouldn't use it as just general lighting in the living room or anything. I wanted to use them outside. The output was bright enough to be useful, but it has nothing on a 75 watt outdoor flood light. Sadly the lumen maintenance on this is horrible too. In just under 3 weeks plugged in on the workbench where you see it in the picture it has reduced it's output to just a little more than half the original lumens. So it's gone from dim but usable, to just dim in 25 days? I did unplug it to let it cool down before measuring again in case it had some thermal cutback in it's output when it heated up. It seems the LED's on these just aren't getting the heat sinking that they need to last, or they are just cheap LED's to begin with.Next time I will write about some mail order LED lamps that I am excited about, but at a much higher price. To get a real 60 watt replacement that actually outputs that much light and will be reliable for the actual lifespan that they calculate is possible, but it will cost you better than $200 for each lamp! There are some good spot lights and other such bulbs out there though if you know where to order from. I"ll post pictures and links in a future article.
As of this moment though, here just aren't any available at traditional non-mail order places that I can find that are worth the money. It's very much like the very beginning of the CFL business. Wildly differing build quality and light quality from various vendors. I expect we'll see some good quality lamps appearing in the next few years, but what I see is companies that concentrate on selling to big users like hotels and business and such leaving very little that we consumers can easily get ahold of in less than truckload quantities at less than $200 a bulb...