It's Official: LED Lights Are Coming

The future of lighting is here, it's just not evenly distributed. Light-emitting diodes (LED) lightbulbs have been coming on the market in the past few years, but their quality varies greatly, from "almost perfect" to "horrible."

The Qnuru bulbs use LEDs made by Cree. The versions are "cool white" (6000k temp), they're also available in "warm white" (3000k). They use a standard E26 socket and use respectively 6.4 watts and 9.2 watts, and they're both rated as replacing 60W incandescents, though the bigger OPAL definitely produces more light and has a wider beam angle.

They have a 50,000+ hours lifetime, which compares very favorably to about 15,000 hours for compact fluorescent (CFLs) and 2,500 hours for incandescent bulbs. It makes more sense to pay extra for quality if you're going to be potentially keeping these lights around for decades. In fact, they come with a 3 year warranty, not something you'll find on any fluorescent!

And of course, because they are LEDs, they don't contain any mercury, and they are a lot less fragile than CFLs and incandescents.