Is the Finally Light Bulb the light we've been waiting for?

[MUSIC] Hey I'm C-net's Ry Crist. When you're buying a light bulb, your options typically boil down to incandescent, flourescent and LED. But the finally lightbulb is a new option that wants to give you an alternative. Now, before you get worried that there's a fourth lightbulb category to keep track of, keep in mind, that this is actually more of a flourescent then anything else. Inside, you'll find mercury and other flourescent gases that interact with that electromagnetic electricity in order to produce the light. That's really the same thing that a CSL does, it gets that electricity to the gas in a different way. The benefit to that approach is that the Finally Light Bulb can promise to last 15,000 hours. That's longer then the 5-8 thousand hours that you will get with the CSL. But not as long as most LEDs that can promise up to 25,000 hours. It's also not quite as efficient as an LED Uses 14 and a half watts to put out a state at 800 lumens. Most LED's now a days are well under ten watts to do the same thing. The big claim here though is better light quality and that's where I begin to have some problems with this bulb. First off it's not quite as bright as advertised. We clocked it at 589 lumens and our integrating Well underneath the stated 800 lumens. We've similar problems with brightness in other fluorescent bulbs. We've also seen poor color rendering scores and the Finally Bulb wasn't much different. If you look at this picture of an appetizing looking bowl of M&Ms lit by the Finally light bulb, you can see that the colors all look kind of muted, and the white kind of yellowed out. Not a great result, especially when you compare it to a 60 wide incandescent. You can see the whites a lot better, there. The colors pop a little more, and it's brighter, over all. Now the final lightbulb does get somethings right with color quality, especially when it comes to skin [UNKNOWN] We tested this out by holding my hands in two separate compartments of our light box that 60 watt incandescent on the right and finally on the left. You can see that it looks very similar. The hands both look nice. The skin tones get complemented by the light. And the reason for it has to do with the way the bulb is emitting light. Now if you look at this graph, this is a very wonky looking graph, but bear with me. Now an incandescent and an LED will produce a graph that's a smooth sloping line. The fluorescent lights we test all have these kinda spiky graphs. And those spikes are all the different gasses in the bulb that are interacting with the electricity. Produce light at specific parts of the wavelength. So you get a spike for magenta, a spike for green, a big spike for yellow. All that adds up to the way the bulb looks. With the [UNKNOWN] bulb, you can see the nice, healthy spike in magenta that's very helpful for Awful for skin tones. You can also see that spike in the invisible infrared part of the spectrum. That tells you that the bulb is trying to sort of enhance the way reds pop. That spike isn't gonna make the bulb any brighter, but it is going to make reds look a little better. But it does some things right with color quality. Overall though, I just don't see the value here. This is a $10 bulb and you have to pay shipping as well. There are tons of LEDs that cost less than that right now, including dimmable ones. You can't dim this. I say stick with those, unless Finally lowers the price. For more check out my full review at cnet.com and field your lightbulb questions to me on twitter. For Cnet appliances I'm Ry Crist.