Review of Philips 410290 Dimmable AmbientLED 17-Watt PAR38 Indoor Flood Light

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These are very pretty as is the light they cast. I have about 30 of them. I buy a few at a time and have about 10 to go before I am done (big house).

I've stopped buying until I can figure out an issue.

Appears that approximately every 10th one starts to blink about 1 to 2 hour after turn on. Many wouldn't notice as they might not leave the lights

on that long. Stops if you turn it off for a while, but starts again later. Possible this problem is more widespread as I never turn some of these on

for that long. I am much more worried that perhaps all of them will do it as they age. That would be a complete disaster as I would have no recourse

and be out 4 figures.

These are in open overhead canisters. They do get hot.

Note: I tested a blinking light in different canisters, continues to blink after long warm-up in each location

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These lights look nice, they come on instantly, and the color temperature seems right. Oh, and they fit perfectly in our ceiling cans.

The reason I am knocking them down is that they just aren't that bright and they're not really a flood pattern. The light they put out goes pretty much straight down so there are bright circles on the floor that are about 3 feet across. In my office this means that the center of the room has light, but the perimeter is quite dark, including over my desk where I need light. The two can lights are in the center of the ceiling and the room is only 9' or so wide, so it's pretty sad to me that a "flood" light can't even come close to reaching the sides of the room. A proper flood pattern would make these bulbs nice!

Hopefully I can use these somewhere else in the house.

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I never fully bought into CFLs. I love the idea of saving power and replacing bulbs less frequently (especially those that require a ladder to reach), but CFLs have a number of annoyances: they take a long time to warm up, they aren't dimmable, they seem to buzz slightly, their light isn't quite the right color for my taste, and they're made with mercury, which is toxic.

I randomly stumbled across this bulb on Amazon and was excited I didn't realize that LED spotlights were finally ready for prime-time. I decided to buy one as a test about a month ago.

I've been very happy with it. On all accounts, it's better than the CFLs. It turns on nearly instantly (not quite as fast as an incandescent, though -perhaps a quarter of a second between when I hit the switch and when the room illuminates). It's silent. The light from this bulb is bright, clean white. It uses no mercury. It dims! It supposedly has a longer lifetime, though I haven't owned it long enough yet to confirm that. And, compared to incandescent bulbs, it uses a tiny fraction of the power for the same light. With my old halogen bulbs, the studio light I use for my office would get so hot I couldn't even touch the can for 10 minutes after turning the light off. This LED bulb is much cooler while operating. While the bulb itself is too warm to touch while operating, the can it's in remains cool. It gives me a nice warm fuzzy feeling that I'm not burning a ton of electricity on pointless heating (which then has to be removed by my air conditioning, paying for it twice.)

While this bulb has been a huge success in my office studio light, the one downside to this particular model is that it's too big to fix into my recessed ceiling fixtures. I still have to find a smaller one for that, and then I'll probably upgrade the unholy mixture of CFLs and incandescents in the kitchen to 100% LED.

I also own a small Cessna aircraft, and was so happy with the technology that I upgraded my landing and taxi lights to LEDs too -not using these particular bulbs, since the aircraft is certificated, but with FAA-approved PAR36 LED bulbs made by Whelen.