Nope, they're in the eccentrics basement with all the electric model trains. I use them to the see my vhs tapes and albums.
Nope, they're in the eccentrics basement with all the electric model trains. I use them to the see my vhs tapes and albums.
Most people are money shoppers.
They have no concept of tint or runtime of lumens, or only vaguely so.
They just want to get something that never demands bulb swap and only occasional, rare battery swap.
They know than the latest-greatest $25 Chimart item will run for 10 or 20 hours versus incans for 1.5 hours at most and get dim fast
Most of the gents using incans are the ones using small form like A2 and those using super-ultra bulbs long or short lifetime but used primarily in microscopes, projectors etc. First group is using them cause of the size, tint and some emotions, other group because they don't care about runtime (mostly) but to have old school bright, power drain monster, same like muscle cars.
Nope, they're in the eccentrics basement with all the electric model trains. I use them to the see my vhs tapes and albums.
As a "LED guy" I might have indulged in some schadenfreude in the past watching incandescents disappearing from store shelves. Now I'm just slightly wistful. Incandescents may have been inefficient and permanently on the low end of the CCT spectrum but they were also mercifully simple with so little to go wrong: bulb or batteries in almost all cases.
Incandescents will be around as long as there's a market for them - something I've been saying for a while now. Surefire may no longer sell incandescent models and I doubt that the local megalomart sells bulbs anymore, but I imagine that there are still places to find bulbs - be they P60 lamps or PR based lamps. Much like how desktop computers are now out of fashion with the broader market interested in laptops and cellphones, one has to go slightly out of their way to procure them.
However, unlike desktop computer enthusiasts, the incandescent flashlight market isn't likely to merely compact down to the power user and gaming market. There is a real possibility that it will all but disappear within the next decade or two to the point that true retail specialists are the sole outlets for components and boutique producers all that remain for the lamps themselves.
Consider median incandesecent flashlight design over the past ~20 years. At one end you have $10 Ray-O-Vacs and at the other you have beasts like the Surefire M6. The overwhelming majority of production was at the Ray-O-Vac end of things but the value balance may well tilt towards the Surefire. ~10 years ago at the Ray-O-Vac end of things when LED domination was already apparent they started transitioning in a way that would be the most cost-effective for the producers: using the same basic designs and tooling with LED shoehorned in ala the LED dropin bulb, then as tooling wore out or stocks ran down they began producing purpose-built flashlights and never looked back. At the Surefire end there's more end-user investment and less producer dependence on volume, but they still move with the markets like everyone else; and while they can turn a tidy profit on replacement bulbs retailing for ~20x what the Ray-O-Vac end of the market captures there's still a point where they too may need to exit the market.
With the Ray-O-Vac end of the market seeing volumes drop to near-zero, itself supporting some of the industrial base that the Surefire end needed, it's not hard to foresee the industry winding down eventually. The Ray-O-Vac market has relatively little investment in their products; $10-$20 flashlights bought after 15 seconds of deliberation at the megalomart that need bulbs costing $1-$2 each are not something the consumer has much concern about. The Surefire market has high investment, but they're kinda-sorta indirectly subsidized by the Ray-O-Vac end of the market ... there's a period where the true incandescent fans will dig in and pay more to support their product, but it's a demographic all but guaranteed to shrink so the original producers either shut down incandescent production entirely or firesale the production lines to boutique producers to make a go of it.
I can't say that individual stockpiling of incandescent lamps is all that irrational - there may come a point where NOS (New Old Stock) is all that's available on the market in certain categories.
Interesting analysis.
I remember a few years ago when incan bulbs were mandated to be phased out and there were long lines and people bought them by the cases. To have enough for decades. The CFL alternatives were awful. They were dimmer, the color spectrum was way off, they took time to warm up and more expensive. And if you broke them, the icing on the cake was that you had to clean all the mercury vapors out of them.
They lasted longer but not so much longer as to reimburse the higher purchase price. They had all the disadvantages but few advantages. I don't know what the advantages were. Aside from the (stated) lower consumption. They were a 4-letter word in short.
Now both are obsolete and nowhere to be found. Costco, Chimart, big box stores, etc all have just one thing in stock. Nobody in their right mind buys incan household bulbs or CFL bulbs.
Amazingly the prices have come down significantly also on the alternatives.
It's not OT in the sense that is preview of things to come for the incan industry.
Either right here, right now or just around the corner. Sorry to be Debbie the Downer.
I heard those incan guys still have mullets and drive Trans Ams too, lol.
Seriously though, I get a lot of requests to restore incan lights from my blog which leads me to believe there's a good bit of folks out there still using and valuing them.
At at the core most of the lights purchased are frivolous emotional purchases and that's ok so let's try not to knock someone else's hobby by saying it's irrelevant. I have plenty of expensive LED lights that I know I don't need but I'm not going to say they are useless. They're fun just like my incans!
This is a silly thread. Can we get back to discussing incans instead of discussing their relevance? The fact that this forum exists and is active proves they are relevant. /thread
In my experience, CFLs were pretty tolerable in their earlier iterations - lasted for many years, started up fast, and had decent color rendition. At $10 each they were good lamps; at $5 each were marginal; and at $2 they sucked. With each reduction in cost the OEMs cut something out and made them worse. They do contain mercury, but the fear of that mercury seems to be overblown - I'm not aware of any instances of poisoning traceable to CFLs; even linear tubes have a tiny fraction of the stuff that they did up until the early 80s.
I had no regrets about the CFLs I bought at ~$10 each circa 2002-2004. Most lasted 5+ years, some lasted me through 3 locations and 10 years. By any reasonable assessment of TCO I came out well ahead of incandescents.
Modern CFLs? I've down to 4: 3 candelabra base bulbs in a fixture over my stairs that I wish would die; a 4th in a drill press (had to do something with the 4th one in the pack) that's just tolerable / not used often enough to justify replacement.
Watching people gaze in frustration at the light bulb selection in the likes of Home Despot, I too am amazed that there's a market for CFLs given the visceral lip-curl I see when people look at them. Many yearn for the simplicity of incandescent where the variables were wattage, formfactor, and a few gimmick-y attempts at differentiation ala GE Reveal. LED has gained some acceptance as retail prices have dropped - with consequences similar to CFL. But the market misses incandescent with its cheap initial purchase price that's felt immediately as opposed to that silent, invisible operating cost that always dwarfs purchase price. Throw in the market's love of dimmers, occupancy sensors, and other gewgaws designed specifically to work with incandescent filaments that CFL and LED don't adapt to as gracefully alongside CFL/LED failure modes that incandescent never suffered and it's a bit more understandable. In my region air conditioning is the dominant consumer of electricity 6+ months of the year so whatever savings CFL/LED promises is difficult to see when that electrical bill comes due.
In another few years I see CFLs disappearing from the market. We'll be down to incandescents and LED. With enforcement of the previous administration's prohibition against incandescents scuttled by congress and the present administration's apparent disinterest in this flavor of regulation I expect the legal barriers to selling incandescents will be reduced (I'm simply assessing history here and have zero interest in arguing the politics). Producers may be reluctant to re-commit to incandescents however due to lack of certainty with regards to long term domestic policy and more consistent international regulatory pressure against them. Barring some of the materials-science breakthroughs we've heard rumblings about but yet to see on the market I suspect that the incandescent lamp for general illumination will shrink down to a specialty / limited-production item as the generations that grew up with / loved incandescents age out.
Arch- What comes around, goes around. What's old is new again. Pick your adage. I received a user E1e from the 'Bay this afternoon that's in my pocket right now. Popped a LF HO-E1R in there with an Efest IMR 16340. Rockin' the single output, inefficient battery killer to walk the pups tonight. I will have a black BOSS 70 in my back pocket though, just in case... Don't worry, there will be a niche market for tubes, and somebody will produce them. Right now, we have Lumensfactory, Tad's customs, and who else producing incan bulbs to keep the classic Surefire's going?
Nevermind factory support for Mags, Streamlight, Rayovac, etc...