Good question!
First, a little about me: I’m not a lighting engineer, but I’ve tested and reviewed light bulbs for CNET for over five years now. That includes hundreds of hours in our homemade lighting lab — a climate-controlled room equipped with a spectrometer and an integrating sphere that lets us run the most scientific and accurate light bulb tests we can possibly run. I’ve also visited and written features about major North American lighting manufacturers such as Cree and GE to get a better understanding of their methods and standards. This is one of numerous LED buying guides and roundups that I try to update as often as possible.
A peek inside our integrating sphere.
We load each bulb we test into the center of our integrating sphere — a big, hollow ball with special, reflective paint coating the inside. Our spectrometer peeks in through a tiny hole in the…
