Drab said:
. . . more mercury is released to the environment through burning the coal to illuminate an incandescent bulb's delta power usage than is contained in the CFL itself!
Good point.
fell_brook said:
you'll still be able to buy incandescents here in the states. they'll just be called specialty bulbs. that's what my local electrical supply house told me.
Most likely, true. There are several specialty lighting supply houses in L.A. which service the movie industry. I imagine photo-balanced incandescents (as well as regular household incandescents) will be around for a while for those gaffers that require them (expensive, and last only a few hours). We have a couple cases of those at work.
jonnyapple said:
Drab, the ballasts in CFLs have to be small and because of that I believe they're all electronic and are typically in the 1-2kHz range and not the mains frequency. I just shot 4 images of one at 1/8000 s shutter speed and didn't see much brightness variation if any. My guess is the phosphors' fluorescence doesn't decay much before the next high voltage pulse. (See, Niko? So much photo relatedness!)
We have 6,500-degree Kelvin, LEDs, T5s, T8s, and a couple T12s throughout the house, and in all of our outdoor and landscape lighting fixtures. The fluorescents all appear to be 60Hz, but I'm not sure. The LED's frequency appears to be higher (or, lower) than 60 Hz. They all white-balance fine, even on the preset daylight settings on my cameras (even though they're 1,000 degrees cooler). The super-white color rendition, lowered heat generation, and overall energy savings, are all big pluses to me.
