With the ban of incandescent lamps with power consumption larger than and equal to 100W issued by the National Development and Reform Commission on October 1st of 2012, the LED lighting industry received strong supports from related government policies. It is clear that the entire lighting industry is transforming from traditional lighting to LED lighting.
During this period of time (when incandescent lamps have been gradually replaced by new lighting sources), LED lamps are not completely resisted by ordinary consumers. They just felt hesitate to accept. Currently, LED lighting products are still in an immature stage: unclear product identification, lacking of unified standard, products with different quality. Recently, the Guangdong Provincial Bureau of Quality and Technical Supervision spot checked some LED samples from different LED Panel Light manufacturers. The truth is the FPY of these samples is too low.
In this spot checking, among totally 23 samples (more than 100 for each sample) from 21 LED manufactures, 17 samples did not pass the test. The pass rate was less than 30%. The low FPY (First Pass Yield) slows down the development of LED lighting industry.
Experts gave advices about LED lighting products on the market:
1) Inspect the packaging at first: trademarks and certification marks are necessary, like 3C certification, CE certification, RoHS certification, etc.. Besides, some basic technical parameters also cannot be ignored: the rated voltage, voltage range, color temperature, precautions, safety instructions, application environment.
2) Price comparison: As a result of the expensive production cost, the average selling price of LED lamps is usually around 45 yuan. (Products from large brands will more expensive, like Phillips, OSRAM, etc.) Besides, the glaze surface is also very important, without any glue mark, without any protruded screws. And the color of screws should be identified with the color of the surface.
3) Buyers should carefully examine the color change after the lamp has been switched on. If the light changed from yellow to white or from white to blue-white during the short time after lamps being switched on, there must be something wrong the drivers or light sources. Also for small-power MR16 spotlights, using inappropriate transformers may cause flickers. High-frequency electronic transformers are more suitable for this kind of products.