RedBird LED Reviews...

The quest for really good LED replacement bulbs continues and shows promise but still some shortcomings.

On recommendations from friends on the XTension mailing list I ordered a couple of bulbs from http://www.redbirdled.com/ They show some good construction quality and very usable light color and quality, but still have issues that make it difficult for me to recommend them completely. Though I had no issues that required contacting them I've heard from others that the company is also terrific with customer service.

The furst bulb is this 8 watt array, 60 watt replacement. Normally I've recommended to stay away from bulbs with arrays of small LED's as I've never seen one that was of a high quality, these really do seem to be worth a try.

The construction appears very good, the metal looking parts are actually metal. The light color that I ordered was the warm white and they do compare favorably to a real 60 watt bulb. My problem with them is that they flicker horribly. They are dimmable which is a plus, and they appear to work pretty good with X10 lamp modules. But as with many LED's you can't turn them all the way off with a dimmer. Even some regular, non-x10 dimmers cannot turn them all the way off. I imagined using it in my bedside lamp which is on a manual slide dimmer thing but you can't turn it off and it would have been too bright to sleep next to even with just the leakage voltage of the dimmer. These ballasts need a system where they realize they should actually be off even if a tiny amount of current is still available. But the real deal killer here is the flicker. It is not subtle. I've placed this light into the kids bathroom overhead light which we usually leave on all night and I'll wait to see if they complain, but I could not put it anywhere I spent a lot of time or worked under due to the flicker. Fix the power supply though and the LEDs and construction quality of them really are nice.

The second bulb I ordered was a wide dispersion flood light. I like LED spotlights very much, but flood lighting they just haven't been good at yet because they just dont make enough light. This bulb bucks that trend with a really wide and really bright light.

This is a "warm white" but the specs say 3200k. For a CFL warm white is usually 2700k and 3000k or higher are called "bright white" here is the bulb in front of some 3000k CFLs and you can see it's considerably cooler in temperature, but still very usable. This light uses 15 watts and if you use it to replace a current flood you will not be disappointed with the light output.

It is also very hefty, a pound and a half of solid aluminum in the frame and heat sink! I believe it is a single big emitter under the diffusion cover too which is interesting. This is the only led flood light I've owned that actually put out enough light for a real overhead replacement. I could actually put these in my kitchen and not have a decrease in the light available, though it would cool off the light temp in there which I'm not sure I like, but it's not horrible like some really cool LEDs are. I would get used to these. But again, power supply issues cause me to fail to really recommend it. The light is not dimmable, thats OK, neither are the CFL's I've got in the kitchen here. The problem is that it takes a full 5 seconds to light up after you turn the power on. I understand some power supplies do this, but 5 seconds? There is no visible flicker at all which is nice, but if I were to replace all the kitchen lights with these people would turn it on and stand there blinking in the dark for 5 seconds.

So we continue to make serious progress in LED replacement bulbs. This company has the build quality and the LED's down it would seem (though I haven't tried to do any lumen maintenance tests with these) but some work on the power supplies is still needed.