LED Lightbulbs are a ripoff!

[Acorn Eyes]

 

Those LEDs are sold for something like $0.20/LED. But they charge $10 for 4 LEDs ($0.80), a piece of cardboard ($0.10), and a PCB ($1).

 

 

[njmyers3]

Plus the price of designing, testing, getting regulations approved, and manufacturing. The price will drop as more companies make LED bulbs, but now now, there isn't a lot of competition.

[bgibbz]

You are just thinking of material cost. There is cost in engineering, manufacturing, and distributing the product. Add markup, and you got a 10$ product. 

[NannerBeans]

It's not just material costs. It's like with anything, every step it goes through to get to you, someone takes a cut. 

[Flight1sim]

If you look at things with that standpoint, then literally everything is a ripoff

[mariushm]

The power supply in that bulb has to go through certifications, like how much interference it causes to other devices and stuff like that. A single test could cost thousands of dollars, and then for every iteration and cost saving modification you'd have to do those tests again and pay for them. Sure, a company making led bulbs will reuse the same design of the power supply in several units so they save money there.

The LEDs are also probably not quite the cheap kind, they're probably leds with high CRI (87 or better) so they're slightly more expensive but since Cree makes them it's like buying them in hundreds of thousands of units, with the volume discounts.

The biggest costs are probably the circuit boards on which the leds are soldered to, which are aluminum backed pcbs, that are a bit more expensive than regular boards and an additional cost is cutting them to the shape you see. 

Such shapes are cut from bigger shapes, from circuit boards that are maybe one meter wide by two meters long or something like that. You put leds on the big pcb, roll the big board through reflow oven to solder the leds automatically and then you have a machine that uses a high speed drill to cut the shapes from the big circuit board.

There's a lot of wasted circuit board and there's lots of time wasted drilling and the drill bits cost and have to be replaced often so that adds to the price of a circuit board.

Then they have to pay employees to take four of those leafs and put them in the layout you see in the movie and manually solder them together (if they don't have a machine doing it automatically). Then each led goes to a testing location where it spends a few hours (this is relative, depends on market, for some countries could be as low as 1-2 hours , for others could be as much as 24 hours) turned on to make sure each unit survives (infant mortality), then some companies also run the units for a few hours somewhere with lots of vibrations to make sure the units won't die during shipping due to solder joints cracking or solder remains breaking off and shorting something inside the bulbs.

The company has to pay electricity for those machines and for the time wasted testing each bulb in these machines... has to pay the people moving the units around, then has to pay people to package the bulbs if they don't have machines doing it automatically, then put the retail boxes in bigger boxes and the bigger boxes in pallets for distribution.

The price of the led bulb includes the tiny profit of the company, also has to include some extra money to cover for the small number of units that are broken during shipping ( let's say maybe 2-4 out of 100 for such units) , the price also has to cover the warranty costs (manufacturer estimates how many will fail within a year or the amount of warranty the bulb has, for such led bulbs i'd estimate maybe 4-6% of them die within a year, so the price includes the cost of replacing that small percentage... there's some cost added to cover those leds returned by customers for various reasons which still work but can't be resold to people (for example someone may buy bulb and return it within 2 days in original packaging and can be placed back on shelves but others may return them after a week without packaging so can't sell it anymore, some stores treat this as "spoilage" or say the bulbs arrived broken or refuse to pay manufacturer for them)

So basically your 2-3$ in raw materials turn into 4-5$ after you pay wages and electricity and water and everything in the factory and then turns into 6$ at the factory door (1$ profit for a 5$ part is around 20%, which is on the low side) and then turns into 7$ at the store after 1$ is lost in shipping costs and profits for distributors and then the store adds 3$ as their profits and you get your 10$ price on shelves.

 

Here's a "cheap" factory and all its equipment.. think how much it would cost you to buy all the individual things you saw in the movie:

 

 

 

[You_are_a_cunt]

I've completely replaced my room lights with WangHanLo RGB LED strips (10 EUR for a 5m kit) and in the time from installing it my flatmate changed 6 LED bulbs. That's roughly 35-40 EUR in about 7 months.

[mariushm]

18 minutes ago, revsilverspine said:

I've completely replaced my room lights with WangHanLo RGB LED strips (10 EUR for a 5m kit) and in the time from installing it my flatmate changed 6 LED bulbs. That's roughly 35-40 EUR in about 7 months.

Those led strips often last longer because they're in open air, they're cooled much better than the leds sealed inside a bulb, in the case of cheap LED bulbs.  Your friend shouldn't cheap out on led bulbs and then they'd last years.

 

Also, those led strips and the cheap led bulbs have horrible CRI (color reproduction index). They're acceptable if all you do is gaming or you basically want to lit a hallway, but you wouldn't want to light up a bathroom (especially if you have women using make-up in your house) or your room if you're into photography or video editing, where color accuracy matters.

LED bulbs with low CRI are like those yellowish night lamps on the roads, which basically make you see everything in grayscale.. they distort the colors you see because the light they emit has lousy spectrum. If you have a nice IPS panel on your lcd monitor, it's almost like reverting back to a TN panel.

 

led strips have cri around 75, cheap led bulbs are around 80-82, while proper high quality led bulbs are around 87 ( see for example the Ikea Ledare light bulbs) and the best out there reach 92-95. 

[You_are_a_cunt]

4 minutes ago, mariushm said:

~SNIP~

Agreed. Flatmate isn't cheaping out on the bulbs (unless Philips went to shit since last I checked)

[bob345]

Just because the BOM cost is low doesn't mean that is all it takes to manufacture. You have to take into account engineering, testing, quality control, and quite a few other things. Lastly, Its called business. The goal is to make money, not break even.

[Mira Yurizaki]

The BOM of an iPhone is something like $200. You could exclaim Apple is ripping you off, but you still have to pay the engineers, developers, and testers to make sure the phone works. This is why it's often cheaper to build your own high end rig than to let a boutique do it: they're charging you extra for a service

 

I mean, if you want your 20 cent LED lights, you can always build one yourself.

[daimenworrall]

Not to mention the R&D and materials it takes to convert house voltage to the voltage for the LEDs AND keeping it all contained in a relatively small package AND keeping it cool.

There's a lot of engineering in them there bulbs. 

[Scheer]

*That very specific* LED Lightbulb is a ripoff! I'm fairly sure it isn't even sold anymore as the newer ones are much better value, at the time it was likely a really good deal. I know a year ago (date of the video) I was paying about $30 for the nice LED bulbs.

 

I'm only paying $1.50 for a basic 60W bulb (POS Philips line from Home Depot), about $3 for the nicer dimming ones (GE), and $10 for the 100W dimming (Feit) in the heavy aluminum case for heatsinking (exterior lights).

 

Even paying $10 for that is a much better deal than 99 cents on an incandescent bulb that will use $10 of electricity in a few months compared to a few years.