LEDs: Throwing Some Light on the Hype - Boing Boing

LEDs: Throwing Some Light on the Hype - Boing Boing: "There Are Good LED Lights Out There; But You Probably Can't Afford Them
A Twitter friend lamented the other day that LED lighting technology just isn't getting any better. And that's wrong. Right now, if you were a city manager, the owner of a fine hotel (like the Wit) or somebody with enough cash to hire a lighting designer to pick out the fixtures in your living room, you could go drop some money on LED lights that would work great, look beautiful and (depending on your project) give you some big savings on energy use. The obvious problem here is that, with a few exceptions, you are likely none of those things.
No, what you see is the stuff for sale at Home Depot. And that, my friends, is usually not worth your time or money. Not yet, anyway. Buy 'em if you want, but prepare for disappointment...Christmas tree lights that say 'white' and turn out to be blue...$20 lightbulbs that conk out after two weeks. That's a lot of what's out there. Case in point: A couple weeks ago, I was at an LED conference and one of the speakers told a story about buying 10 screw-in LED lightbulbs from his local Costco, just to see what they'd do. The box claimed they'd last 30,000 hours. Within two weeks, four were dark, and one had changed colors and started blinking. Less than two months later, all the lights had dimmed out enough to be useless. I've heard that same, basic story about 50,000 times now. Sure, there may well be good, affordable products out there. But you have no way of telling the difference, which brings me to...."