IKEA Ledare 400lm Bulb Review

electronupdate

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Apr 23, 2013
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A video review of an IKEA LEDARE 400 lm at this link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuLB6Bie0rk

The $/lm and lm/watt is not class leading and the power factor is far from unity. Ikea seems to have more focused on quality of light. The bulb had low flicker and a higher than normal CRI (>87).

Price was below $10.00. Bulb is relatively attractive when powered off (and within the sphere of Ikea's world that's _very_ important).

This makes sense. Ikea nails the retail part of equation (less than $10.00) and the focused on interior design aspects (light quality, CRI, bulb attractiveness).

Within my engineering frame-of-mind $/lm and lm/watt are my key touchstones... however it's easy to forget the 'soft' retail aspects and what it takes to make a compelling market sucessful products.
 

wws944

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Jun 12, 2011
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Thanks! It is great that you tested the dimming.

A while back, IKEA announced that they will only be selling LED lighting by 2016. So it will be fun to see what they come up with.
 

EngrPaul

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Looks like an enlarged version of a typical candelabra bulb. All that plastic, including the secondary dome, must diminish the transfer of photons. I've noticed that this type of plastic becomes opaque after warming up, further diminishing output. I don't think it makes practical sense to bury the LED's deep in the bulb from an efficiency point of view, other than reducing the distance to the heat sink and pack the LED's nearby to the main board.

Thank you for the review!
 

SemiMan

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Jan 13, 2005
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When you have no concern for power factor (so will never get Energy Star) and have no concern for dimming, it is very easy and chip to have fairly little flicker.

I hope he used a much bigger circle for light distribution measurement. That circle is way too small.

Semiman
 

fefrie

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Jan 5, 2007
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I don't know how efficient these bulbs are, but I had the nice luck of snagging a large bag of various ikea halogens/cfl/led bulbs in the as is section.

I don't know how efficient these are, but the light quality is excellent. It's very close to the warmtn of an incandescent.

It might consume more power than necessary, but for my workstation, two 4.5w bulbs have replaced a 60w and a 30w bulb.
 

JoakimFlorence

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Jun 4, 2016
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The current version of the Ledare bulb is 91-94 CRI and the ambiance of the light appears very close to an incandescent bulb.
The bulb emits a very slight buzzing sound but it's only discernible with your ear close to the lamp. (My ears are very sensitive and I can't discern any sound coming from the lamp at all standing at a normal distance)
There is no flicker, and surprisingly the bulb does a good job of putting light out in all directions, downwards as well as up (of course it's not quite as good as incandescent bulb, but you would never notice anything was off behind a lampshade).

The CRI (or light quality) is surprisingly high compared to all the other ordinary LED bulbs that are being sold. (The figures come from a test done by a Russian member in another forum, the test results were all in Russian. Unfortunately I can't find the link to the page right now)
 
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