"ban the incandescent" !?!

Ben, don't throw them away. My town dump will collect them. There needs to be more education on this fact.

 

 

Plus over the life of the bulb less mercury will get into the environment due to decreased coal burning. I don't know if this is less than the CFL has in it, but it could be. If so, even throwing it away would be neutral. But please recycle them.

Al, you know i have a great deal of respect for your knowledge of photography. but, color that is "not all at that bad" sounds not all that good for producing flattering skin tones, something tungsten illumination excels at. as for fill-flash, there is the issue of having to use filtration to match the flash with the ambient light. otherwise, the results are (dare i say it) "gruesome", in my experience.

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further, fill-flash isn't "available light photography". i can't keep pop-pop-popping with fill-flash and still capture those spontaneous moments that my clients (so far, at any rate) feel much better depict the true personality of their friends and relatives than flash shots they've seen.<p>

responding to another post, i don't think most venues will purchase their screw-in flourescent lights from a pro photo shop. below is a comparison of fluorescent vs. tungsten taken of the same subjects at the same event.

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<img src="http://www.r-s-r.org/rsr/images/qaia/IMG_5213-1a800.jpg">

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<img src="http://www.r-s-r.org/rsr/images/qaia/IMG_5225-1a800.jpg ">

I have not been impressed with the CFL...I bought one for a porch light. the low wattage bulb was supposed to give the same "brightness" as a 60-watt incandescent. Sure, it still works, but is as dim or dimmer than a 40-watt bulb. I have 60-watt incandescent bulbs in my house that are just as old (maybe older) and they have retained their light quality. I have a small house, the savings from a CFL would not be significant enough to recoup the cost of the bulb. I would rather have cheap, bright lights than expensive dim lights. As far as the mercury, it seems as though the Government usually has no idea what it is getting itself (or us) into IMHO.

I have had mixed experience with fluorescent bulbs. They are fine for b&w photography if they are set up properly and if you are looking for soft light. Color balance isn't an issue. I use mostly CFL bulbs which put out the equivalent of a 100 watt incandescent bulb. Unfortunately most of my fixtures, both here and in my old house, have the bulbs hanging upside down. This drastically reduces their lifespan. Over time parts of the coil start to put out less light. When the bulb sits base down its ballast doesn't heat up as much and it can last longer. I try to buy daylight balanced bulbs because even if I'm not shooting with color film the quality of the regular bulbs is poor by any measure. The other convenience factor I like with incandescent bulbs is that they turn off more quickly and don't have much of an afterglow. In the part of my basement that I use for a darkroom the over head lighting os from long fluorescent bulbs. Each time I turn off the light after looking at a print in the fixer I have to wait before taking out another sheet of paper. I'll probably rig up a plain bulb over the fixer tray to solve this problem. I like what Al said about the heat from incandescent bulbs. In my old house I couldn't always regulate the temperature of the basement that well. Part of the solution was to use a hot screw base quartz bulb in my desk lamp in the winter and a cool CFL in the summer. I tried to use a CFL in a recessed fixture in the ceiling but the ventilation must have been inadequate because both CFL bulbs I tried there burned out very quickly.

 

I am a little unclear on the environmental benefits of CFL bulbs for a few reasons. The mercury issue has already been brought up. A certain percentage of light bulb use is in homes in the evening. Overall electricity demand should be lower in the evening because most people are not working then and most businesses are closed. If electricity needs to be generated constantly and is not stored temporarily in any way then its cost should be lower in the evening. This would make the savings for home use less important than the savings for daytime business use. A lot of what goes into the cost of electricity at the retail level has to do with the delivery network, price regulation and other things not directly related to the actual cost of the fuel being used. You only have to look at what happened to the people in California when Enron took then for an expensive ride.

 

If homes used solar arrays and stored electricity generated by the arrays in fuel cells they could fall back on this supply for evening use. Enough electricity from the grid would be saved that the user could have any kind of bulb and still save money and the use of fuel by the utility company. The contents of used up incandescent bulb are a lot less hazardous than those of a used up CFL. I would have to guess that very few CFL bulbs are being disposed of in a safe way. If the manufacturers had to take them back and carefully recycle the materials, would any money still be saved by using them?

 

I think the idea of eliminating incandescent bulbs is a feel-good type of law making. In the big picture this will not have as much of a positive net effect as people think. When we talk about energy use and carbon in the atmosphere only renewable energy will provide all of the benefits we need. Where I live it can cost more than $800 a month in the winter to heat and light a 4 bedroom house. It's true that we could use better insulation and that a newer furnace would help a little but the fact that I am being overcharged for natural gas (presumable domestic) doesn't make me feel any better than being overcharged for foreign oil. When we replace our system with a geothermal unit and put up a solar array the utility company will be able to sell most of the natural gas and some of the electricity we use to someone else.

"Besides, there are more important things than photography."

 

<plugs ears> NO! I can't hear you, la la la .....!!!!

"the low wattage bulb was supposed to give the same "brightness" as a 60-watt incandescent"

 

they're generally a little over-rated on the packaging. An 11W bulb may say it's equivalent to 60W tungsten, but more like 40-50W as you say. 15W is more like 60W tungsten in my experience. Still a significant difference in efficiency, sometimes the marketing people just get carried away I guess...

Yes, that's it! Let's get the government involved in this kind of an issue. What we clearly need is more government mandated regulations. It's good for you, just swallow and you'll feel a lot better afterwards. Why, government needs more and more impact on our lives anyway. Why, people are too stupid anyway to buy compact fluorescents for those applications where they work well. But wait, you say, aren't there some applications where you need incandescents like low-voltage tungsten halogens for a clean color spectrum? The $%^#&* with clean color spectra, BIG BROTHER tells you to knock if off!

but, don't you understand that there're more important things than individual choice -- for example, providing well paid jobs-for-life with generous benefits to officious bureaucrats who would prefer to choose for us.

Banned in 10 years?

 

You ought to live in Australia. Here the Federal Government recently announced that incandescents will be banned in three years - after that time it will be illegal to sell them. In fact they gave (on application) each household half a dozen energy saver globes and a water-saver shower head. For me the light from these globes is too blue but I've heard that manufacturers will be making them in different light temperatures. A number of lights in our house are on dimmers and the energy saver globes we have so far won't work with dimmers, but I believe that a solution to that is available. So much for modelling lights..

 

Cheers, Bob

Please, somebody tell me how fluorescent is the better of two evils?

Radio interference isn't the worst thing they do, even though I notice some heavy FM interference with a few fixtures and it bugs me. Bad.

The negative impacts on photography aren't the worst thing, even though they are pretty darn bad. I'm not a pro, but I can't seem to make Photoshop clean up that mess.

The mercury content thing is terrible, and don't tell me there is recycling available. Who recycles? I've got a box for all my dead batteries to collect until hazardous household waste day, do you? Who does? How can you mandate fluorescent bulb use without mandating education on handling and disposal of the lethal things?

And more than all that, this is such a small drop in the bucket of national power consumption! All it does is convince people they are doing good on the conservation front which offsets the new SUV or UAV or whatever. No guilt. No problem.

Somebody, please, do you have an answer to these?

It may be presumptuous of me but I suppose the current bulbs have improved over the past 10 years or so. We bought them for the lamps in our den several years ago and they were so dim, we couldn't read by them. They were supposed to be 60W equivalent. We defeated the purpose of using them by replacing a standard 100 watt bulb in another lamp with a 200 watt just to increase the level of illumination. Finally replaced the CFL bulbs altogether due to poor light output. They were very expensive at the time but we wanted to eventually replace all our bulbs with the CFL type. They just didn't put out enough illumination to use any place in our house. I'm hoping the newer models are better.

 

Since my enlargers use incandescent bulbs, I suppose I should stock up on each type and hope the "bulb police" don't catch me.

Stocking up on enlarger bulbs is a good thought. I need them in two sizes. I'm wondering how variable contrast paper and filters will work with them? Of course "cold light" enlargers have been on the marketfor decades, but I've never tried one.

Al, talk about "banning" incandescent bulbs is just talk. Were I you, I'd stock up on enlarger bulbs because they could be discontinued due to fewer and fewer people using enlargers; not because the bulbs would be banned.

I've used these bulbs for some time, but find the lighting somewhat irritating, especially after hours of working with it, and the shape reminds me of a birth control device for some large mammal. Why everybody is jumping on this bandwagon at the same time, pseudoenvironmental experts on the tube breathlessly copying each other with this bulb fad and also telling us to unplug all of our power converters "because they use power" even when your appliance, scanner or whatever is turned off is just inane. I know they use power, I don't need some re-energized busybody ex-EST groupie telling me what to do. I don't feel like turning them off except during storm season when everything gets pulled from all of the wall sockets. I have just purchased an enormous container of "normal" light bulbs and intend to use them as long as possible.

"I am a little unclear on the environmental benefits of CFL bulbs for a few reasons. The mercury issue has already been brought up. A certain percentage of light bulb use is in homes in the evening. Overall electricity demand should be lower in the evening because most people are not working then and most businesses are closed."

 

1. Take the bulbs back to hazardous waste collection day in your town, and demand the retailer return them to the manufacturer for recycling. No reason city hall couldn't have a 24/7 drop location for these bulbs.

2. Almost nobody pays the real time electricity price (yet). If lighting is about 10% of demand, cutting its use is still worthwhile. Businesses do use lamps in daytime. Cutting off-peak use also results in lower air emissions as power plants run less.

3. I'd much rather shoot under CFLs than under incandescents in terms of color balance. Take care not to underexpose and the color balance is quite correctable.

4. " unplug all of our power converters "because they use power" even when your appliance, scanner or whatever is turned off is just inane."

There's a newfangled device called a power strip. Press the off button on the strip when you're not using your computer, TV, etc and you will save money and save electricity. Most of the rest of us don't have money to burn, but maybe you're too priviledged and conceited to understand that.

Mercury in energy-saving bulbs worries scientists

 

By Lisa Von Ahn

Tue Mar 27, 7:08 PM ET

 

NEW YORK (Reuters) - There's an old joke about the number of people it takes to change a light bulb. But because the newer energy-efficient kinds contain tiny amounts of mercury, the hard part is getting rid of them when they burn out.

 

Mercury is poisonous, but it's also a necessary part of most compact fluorescent bulbs, the kind that environmentalists and some governments are pushing as a way to cut energy use.

 

With an estimated 150 million CFLs sold in the United States in 2006 and with Wal-Mart alone hoping to sell 100 million this year, some scientists and environmentalists are worried that most are ending up in garbage dumps.

 

Mercury is probably best-known for its effects on the nervous system. The Mad Hatter in the classic children's book "Alice in Wonderland" was based on 19th-century hat makers who were continually exposed to the toxin.

 

Mercury can also damage the kidneys and liver, and in sufficient quantities can cause death.

 

U.S. regulators, manufacturers and environmentalists note that, because CFLs require less electricity than traditional incandescent bulbs, they reduce overall mercury in the atmosphere by cutting emissions from coal-fired power plants.

 

But some of the mercury emitted from landfills is in the form of vaporous methyl-mercury, which can get into the food chain more readily than inorganic elemental mercury released directly from a broken bulb or even coal-fired power plants, according to government scientist Steve Lindberg.

 

"Disposal of any mercury-contaminated material in landfills is absolutely alarming to me," said Lindberg, emeritus fellow of the U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

 

The mercury content in the average CFL -- now about 5 milligrams -- would fit on the tip of a ballpoint pen, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and manufacturers have committed to cap the amount in most CFLs to 5 milligrams or 6 milligrams per bulb.

 

The majority of Philips Lighting's bulbs contain less than 3 milligrams, and some have as little as 1.23 milligrams, said spokesman Steve Goldmacher.

 

To prevent mercury from getting into landfills, the EPA, CFL makers and various organizations advocate recycling.

 

Besides commercial recyclers and some municipal waste collection services, some retailers accept used CFLs.

 

IKEA, the Swedish home furnishings chain, has free drop-off programs at all of its 234 stores, 29 of which are in the United States. Spokeswoman Mona Astra Liss said response was slow at first, but has since picked up.

 

Now advocacy groups are calling on Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and other big chains to get involved.

 

Andy Ruben, vice president for corporate sustainability at Wal-Mart, said the company was working with the EPA's Office of Solid Waste and others to find mercury and recycling solutions.

 

RECYCLING HURDLES

 

One problem with recycling is that it isn't cheap.

 

Larry Chalfan, executive director of the Zero Waste Alliance environmental group, said the value of the metal, glass and mercury reclaimed from recycling fails to offset the cost of the process. "Someone has to pay," he said.

 

Costs can range from 20 cents to 50 cents per bulb -- not a paltry sum when some CFLs sell for less than $2 at Wal-Mart.

 

But, compared with the overall lifecycle cost of buying and using a bulb, recycling would be less than 1 percent, said Paul Abernathy, executive director of the Association of Lighting & Mercury Recyclers, "a small price to keep the mercury out of the environment."

 

Another obstacle lies in the fragility of the bulbs and their mercury content.

 

"People who are going to accumulate these things from the public are going to have to address the fact that breakage will happen," Abernathy said. "There's the potential for contamination, and I think right now people are a little hesitant to volunteer to take on this liability."

 

The U.S. government has no single recycling plan in mind, said Matt Hale, director of the EPA's Office of Solid Waste.

 

Among the alternatives are special curbside collections by municipalities, mail-back programs by manufacturers and drop-off programs at various places, including retail stores that sell CFLs, he said.

 

Some methods lend themselves to certain geographic areas more than others, Hale said, because of differences in population density, transportation infrastructure and proximity to recycling sites.

 

State laws are also a factor.

 

Federal regulations mandate recycling of fluorescent lighting, while exempting households and other small users. Some states, however, are strict. For example, California no longer allows anyone to throw CFLs in the trash, while Massachusetts requires manufacturers to implement recycling programs and meet certain targets.

 

As technology advances, however, mercury could become less of an issue, at least as far as light bulbs are concerned.

 

Last month General Electric Co. said it was working on doubling the energy efficiency of incandescent lights and eventually developing versions comparable with CFLs. These bulbs, which the company hopes to begin marketing in 2010, will cost less than fluorescents but they won't last as long.

 

Meanwhile, some environmentally minded consumers are embracing CFLs and doing their best to dispose of them responsibly.

 

"I have CFLs throughout my house," said Lindberg, who lives in California. "None of them have burned out yet. I can't tell you what I'll do with them when they've burned out, but I won't throw them in the garbage."

 

I'm a heavy user of fluorescent lamps. I've been getting 840 (4000kelvin and low 80s CRI) and 850 (5000 kelvin and high 80s to low 90s CRI) series T8 bulbs for use in my home and studio. I have more light with less electrical consumption. I don't bother with the compact fluorescent lamps designed to screw into a regular Edison base. I only use purpose made fluorescent fixtures. I have some shorter fixtures that use the PL style twin tube compact fluorescent bulbs. As for ballasts, get fixtures with quality ballasts. GE makes some nice ballasts that don't have AM radio interference, hum or flicker. I've changed the ballasts in some cheeper fiztures to GE ones. Also the life expectancy is wonderfull. The lamps I'm getting are rated for 20,000 hours and I have yet to replace one in 8 years of heavy daily use. PS, in a fixture where one ballast controls multiple bulbs, change all the bulbs on a ballast at once. If you only change one bulb you will halve the life expectancy of the replacement.

 

I'm also looking forward to cheeper LED based lights. They should have 100,000 plus hour life expectancies with no mercury to worry about. The color balance on lamps I've seen recently is getting much better. One way I see some done is to use a UV LED with similar phosphors to what is used in fluorescent lamps. Other designs are going for multiple differnt colored LEDs. Those won't work for photography as they will have a very peaky color spectrum. Because of that I don't expect them to be that well received by the market. The ones using phosphors will produce spectrums as good as any fluorescent lamps and I expect them to be much better received by the market.