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Perhaps dimmable LED bulbs would be better in that regard? The LED dimmers on the market use a very high rate PWM (afaik) to prevent/minimize flickering at low brightness. I would guess that the dimmable bulbs are designed to work well with intermittent power and so wouldn't have the same problem.

Of course it's still hit or miss, compatibility between bulbs and dimmers seems to be very hard to judge without testing these days.




Dimmable LEDs are not automatically flicker-free. My father had very cheap dimmable ones, and I complained at every visit about the strobe effect until he bought flicker-free ones.

Most dimmers work via pulse width modulation [1], i.e. the power supply is switched on/off in a different interval (more off time means lower brightness). A true flicker-free dimmed LED has to be dimmed in an analog way (probably only feasible for "dumb" light bulbs). PWM of 20kHz or something might also work, but who knows what that does to brain waves.

1: https://www.waveformlighting.com/film-photography/an-introdu...


I can't find the source right now, but I read that the fastest cells in the visual pathway can respond at a bit under 500Hz. Part of the reason the ieee suggests a minimum PWM frequency of 3000Hz is, for signal processing reasons I don't fully understand, that's the highest frequency the brain could likely detect, given 500Hz "sampling hardware."


You might still get strobe effects where your 500hz sensing nerves eg get a 400hz signal from a 20khz source.


In my experience, dimmable bulbs are no better. Most of them still suffer from the 120 Hz strobing effect. That's because even though they might PWM at 1-10 kHz to control the dimming function, when A/C voltage crosses zero, the "on" state of the PWM can still be a lot dimmer than the "on" state during the A/C voltage peak.


I would think a good LED would need something like a full wave rectifier with a good smoothing circuit to minimize flicker. I bet a lot of the bulbs on the market cheap out on the electronics though.


My oven has a high / low switch for the LED lights and I can't have it on low because the strobe/flicker drives me nuts.


The bulb they link are listed as dimmable (flicker-free silent dimming) aside from the part they quoted.




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