This focuses more on the quality of light aspects than the pure sleep aspects, but it’s interesting to see other people suddenly waking up to the fact that LED lights are… not great at being good lights.
The efficient future of lighting now includes poor people; it just does it by making lighting one more form of privation.
This is a sentiment I’ve certainly been seeing. Wealthy space? Good light. Poor space? “Shit tier cheap light.”
And regarding a very expensive restaurant:
Maybe I was wrong about LEDs. Maybe I just had to be patient — to wait and let this luminous future trickle down to the rest of us. Later, upon follow-up questioning, I learned that the warmly glowing filaments in the Le Coucou chandeliers are not, in fact, LEDs. They are hot wire filaments. Inside the LED-optimized glass of the chandelier fittings, the LED-forward restaurant is still using incandescents for that ineffable and as yet irreplaceable glow.
I asked Barclay how he would navigate the future. “In the near term,” he said, “I have a large stock of those bulbs.”
The usual suspects at HN are pontificating as usual: There's something off about LED bulbs | Hacker News though it’s interesting to see that this is an “indirect enough” attack that they’re seeming willing to open up about the issues of LED bulbs.
I’ve talked to a few lighting techs (think: stage lighting) who have mentioned that they have to use more lights/different lights now that everything is moving to LED to get the same washes they used to get with a few well placed cans.
I did notice that. My direct attack was very much responded to with “This is crap, and I can’t believe he’s promoting lanterns, and they’re fine, it’s fine, everything’s fine, save the planet with LEDs.” The responses here are much more “Yeah, I’ve noticed they suck, and I shouldn’t have to be a damned PhD in lighting to buy an LED that doesn’t suck…”
One comment in there about amber nail polish is something I plan to run down, though. I’ve got orange filter glasses, and I’ll probably pick up some gels to see what I can do with light fixtures and bulb wraps.