Well, there's a lot of crap LED bulbs being made now too.
LEDs have all sorts of possible shortcomings.  First is that if they run 
them too hot they will degrade in far under their rated life.  The tint, 
throw, and bulb appearance (bare emitters are blinding) are very 
important.  Cheap drivers flicker hard at 60Hz.  Some drivers I would be 
afraid of burning up.  And the total lumens are often on the low power side.

Be aware LEDs are not remarkably more efficient than CFL.  In fact they 
are often /less/ efficient, depending on the type of emitter and ballast 
and optical/thermal designs used.  Neat, yes.  You might wanna take 
stock of your actual goal there.  If it's to save money over CFL, forget 
it that's impossible.  If you wanna say you're efficient but 
mercury-free, well, whatever yeah I suppose you can do that.  If you 
wanna look cool and do something that you haven't seen done yet, then 
that's easy to accomplish.  But like I say there's a lot of crap out 
there that flickers and the tint's bluish or greenish or blue in the 
middle of the beam and yellowish on the outside or... like I say, lots 
of details.

There is no clearly high quality, useful, and affordable LED fixture.

Look up:
http://www.candlepowerforums.com/vb/
Full of LED enthusiasts.

Kaidomain/DealExtreme carry a lot of remarkably cheap LED fixtures.  But 
they ARE usually crap.  Read the reviews for them.  You should probably 
consider the slight risk that one could start a fire due to defective 
ballast.

Danny

Rolf wrote:
> Hi all.
>
> I am in the market for a dozen LED-based bulbs to replace GU10 type 
> halogen lights in my kitchen. I have installed a new set of cupboards on 
> the one wall and the one door for the one cupboard opens underneath the 
> one light. It so happens that I left the cupboard door open for a while 
> and it got scorched by the bulb's heat (even though there was about 2 
> inches of clearance).
>
> Doing a google search for "GU10 LED Bulb" reveals a number of options, 
> and I have tried the phillips AccentLight series... it did not work to 
> our satisfaction (too spot-lighty, and too 'cool', and not enough light).
>
> So, having done more research, I am looking for things in the following 
> ball-parks....
>
> - available in Canada.
> - about 10W of LED power to replace 50W Halogen.
> - more than about 50 degrees projected light (flood not spot).
> - 'warm' white, which I take to mean a colour temperature around the 
> 3000K mark instead of 5000K.
> - good value for money - at about $50 or so (spending more than $500 to 
> light the kitchen seems crazy, but better than a burned down house....).
>
> Obviously I may not be able to get all the above, bu, I am looking for 
> suggestions, brands, and preferably some personal experience with 
> successful installations.
>
> Additionally, it would be a real pain, but I could re-do the lights in 
> the kitchen and replace the GU10 potlights with some other form-factor, 
> but not easily change the location of the lights.... So, if there is a 
> better type of light than the GU10 I would be interested in hearing 
> about that.
>
> Phoning around the 'usual guys' indicates that my 'usual guys' are not 
> familiar with LED lights, and they have come up short on this one.
>
> Thanks in advance
>
> Rolf
>
>
>
>   

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