PRODUCT REVIEW
NorthLux™ 95 CRI A19 LED Bulb for Art & Studio
★★★
Comparing Northlux 5000K and 6500K bulbs with Cree 5000K bulb
I'm a painter, and have no affiliation with either company -- just interested in which bulb will work best for my painting studio and for photographing paintings and comparing scans with the originals. Compared the Cree "Experience Exceptional" 60w equivalent 5000K bulb (TA19-08050MDFH25), with the Waveform Northlux 5000K bulb, for use in painting. My first impression was that the outer shell of the Waveform bulb seemed thinner, and had noticeable scratches and odd places on the surface. Nothing like that on the Cree bulbs. (Once I did get a Cree bulb with a slight scratch and Home Depot replaced it immediately.) Then, although the labeled lumens on the two bulbs are close -- 800 lumens for the Waveform, 815 for the Cree -- the difference was immediately noticeable. At the same distance, my lux meter measured 722 lumens for the Waveform, 956 for the Cree. I knew about other differences. The Cree bulbs are less expensive, dimmable, and carry a 10-year warranty (which I've used and has always been fulfilled). I was willing to overlook these differences, though, if I could see that the Waveform bulbs did show color more accurately, and if the 6500K bulb would be valuable for checking paintings, in case a collector or gallery displayed my paintings in that cool a daylight. So, on to the color comparisons. This was made difficult by the difference in brightness. This seemed to make more difference, to my eyes, than the CRI of the bulbs. The stated CRI for the Waveform is of course 95, and for the Cree just 90+. When this particular series of Cree bulbs was introduced, I talked with a technical expert at Cree about the CRI. He said their tests show that it's quite a bit higher than 90, but they prefer to understate it. Looked at my paint swatches under both lights at different distances. Keep in mind that I'm only using my eyes here, not a spectrometer or any other special tool. I did recently take the hue test, and came out with a perfect score, so my vision seems to be reasonably trustworthy. Having studied the Waveform technical information, I paid special attention to the reds -- also to see if blues and yellows looked warmer or cooler under the two lights. I just couldn't find a difference. So the other question was, would it be worth at least buying the Waveform 6500K bulbs, since Cree doesn't make bulbs with a Kelvin rating that high. I don't enjoy 6500K lighting, but if it made a difference in color values or anything else that would make my paintings look wrong if hung in mainly north light, it would be worth using the bulbs to check that, just as I'd want to check a painting under 3000K halogen light (since many collectors and galleries use that). The 6500K bulb seemed a lot bluer than the daylight -- at least by judging a whiteboard under it in lighting from different directions. And the paint swatches looked fine in that light, no matter how I arranged them. So I decided not to get even the 6500K bulbs. I'll keep them in mind if I do decide later that it matters."
