Feit Electric 40W Equivalent Candelabra Filament LED review: Old-school looks from the fake filament in Feit's candelabra LED

Incandescent looks, LED energy savings. That's the pitch for Feit Electric's "vintage-style" candelabra LED. It's one of a growing number of LED options that arrange their light-emitting diodes to resemble the filaments of old-school incandescent bulbs. It's a neat-looking trick.

5.8

Feit Electric 40W Equivalent Candelabra Filament LED

The Good

As fake incandescents go, Feit's vintage-style LED looks pretty good.

The Bad

Despite calling itself a 40W equivalent, Feit's LED only offers about as much brightness as a 25W bulb. It was also a poor performer in our dimming tests.

The Bottom Line

If you like the look of this light and you don't need it to dim, then it might be worth a try. That said, the smarter play is probably to wait it out with halogens or fluorescents until these kinds of candelabra LEDs get better and more affordable.

But I have a couple of beefs with this bulb. The biggest is that it calls itself a 40W equivalent, which would mean it would need to put out about 350 lumens of brightness from about 4 or 5 watts of power. Instead, it puts out just over 200 lumens from a power draw of 2.5 watts.

That means that you're paying the 40W-equivalent price for what's really a 25W equivalent. Not cool, Feit.

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That price happens to be $9 per bulb -- higher than you'd probably expect, and indicative of the candelabra LED category as a whole, which hasn't seen the same rise in value as we've seen in other, more common LED categories.

The Feit bulb's packaging calls it a 40W-equivalent LED, but also pegs its light output at 210 lumens, which is more in line with what you'd expect from a 25W equivalent. We confirmed that number in our lighting lab, where the bulb rang in at 216 lumens.

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That might not matter so much if you're using several of them in a single fixture (or if brightness simply isn't high up on your list of lighting priorities), but it's still worth keeping in mind. It's also worth noting that the bulb uses less power than the rest of field, too -- just 2.5 watts each.

This isn't the only filament-style candelabra LED in the lighting aisle. EcoSmart makes one, too, and unlike the Feit bulb, it's a legitimate 40W equivalent as far as brightness goes, with a category-leading 482 lumens to its name.

It's also a better pick for enclosed fixtures, where the trapped heat can affect performance.

Still, to my eye, the Feit bulb is the better-looking incandescent imitator of the two. The flame-shaped glass was a better pick than EcoSmart's torpedo-shaped build, which makes it look a bit like an oversize Christmas light.

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Feit's bulb also has a subtle sepia tint that helps pull the color temperature down to an ultrawarm 2,015K. It's a very artificial tone of orange, though, and one that wreaks havoc with the bulb's color-rendering capabilities.

Something else worth considering is dimmability. Put simply, the Feit vintage-style candelabra LED isn't a bulb I'd ever want to use in a fixture that I planned on dimming down low, and without flicker.

The lowest I was able to dim it on any of the switches in our test rig was 14.3 percent, and it flickered noticeably on all of them.

In fairness, none of the candelabra LEDs we tested offered perfect dimming performance, and none of them are as affordable as I'd like to see, either.

At $9 each, Feit's vintage-style LED is a good example of why it probably makes more sense to stick it out with halogens, fluorescents or actual incandescents for a little while longer. The candelabra LED category has some catching up to do.

For more on candelabra LEDs, check out our full category overview.