Green Creative 60W Replacement Titanium LED (Series 4.0) review: Cheaper competitors outshine the Titanium LED

The market for LEDs is maturing rapidly, and that means that it's easier than ever to find light bulbs that offer high efficiency, satisfying light quality, and a reasonable price point. It's a reality that spells competition for off-brand bulbs, and unfortunately, the Titanium LED from Green Creative comes up short.

6.9

Green Creative 60W Replacement Titanium LED (Series 4.0)

The Good

The Titanium LED from Green Creative is both bright and efficient, and performs reasonably well on dimmer switches.

The Bad

At $14, it's more expensive than many of its competitors, including bulbs you can buy right off the shelf at your local hardware store.

The Bottom Line

There's nothing wrong with this LED, but it's priced above competitors that outperform it, which makes it difficult to recommend.

A Bay Area startup, Green Creative first impressed me with its Cloud LED , a uniquely shaped, low-price LED floodlight that performed well in our tests. The $14 Titanium LED, the brand's more traditionally shaped 60W replacement, was also a fairly strong performer, but not as strong as similar bulbs like the Osram 60W Replacement Ultra LED that are available at a lower retail price point. Until that price catches up with the competition, the Titanium LED is a tough bulb to recommend.

Turning on Green Creative's Titanium LED (pictures)

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Design

The Titanium LED doesn't share the Cloud LED's outside-the-box approach to bulb design. With a frosted globe sitting atop a white plastic body that conceals the heat sinks, it's more or less the default build of today's common household LED.

That isn't necessarily a bad thing, especially if you just want a light bulb that'll blend in with your home decor. Still, it might be a disappointment for fans of the Cloud LED's unique design.

The Titanium LED checks most all of the boxes you'd want to see checked when replacing an incandescent. With a stated light output of 800 lumens (we measured it higher than that, at 835), you aren't getting shortchanged on brightness, and with a power draw of just 9 watts, it's efficient enough to claim more than 90 lumens per watt. It's also dimmable down to 3.8 percent of its maximum brightness, and it comes with a 3-year warranty.

All of that is very good, but compare it with that second column in the chart posted above: the Osram 60W Replacement Ultra LED , which costs $4 less than the Titanium LED. With 852 lumens from 8.5 watts, Osram's bulb is good for 100 lumens per watt, dims smoothly down to zero percent, and comes with a 5-year warranty. About the only place the Titanium LED can claim an edge is in the color-rendering score, where it beats Osram by a nose, 80 to 78.

The Cree 4Flow LED is another strong competitor for Green Creative here. While it can't boast efficiency that's quite as high, Cree's plastic-bodied LED does manage to match the Titanium LED's light output, and it also dims down low without the same degree of flicker that we saw from Green Creative (or the Osram, for that matter).

More importantly, the 4Flow also costs just over half of what you'll need to spend for the Titanium LED. For an even cheaper option, you could consider the surprisingly impressive Ikea Ledare LED , which costs just $5.

That's pretty stiff competition for Green Creative. With bulbs like those from Osram, Cree, and Ikea each selling for less than $10, I would have liked to have seen something more from the Titanium LED to justify the $14 price point. It's in a similar position as the $15 Philips 60W Replacement LED , but that bulb at least offers near-perfect dimming. A feature like that, or perhaps a color-rendering score closer to 90 might have helped the Titanium LED to set itself apart.

Performance

The Titanium LED offers a satisfyingly warm color temperature that falls just under 2,700K. As with the Cloud LED, you have a few other color temperature options as well, including an even warmer 2,400K that falls closer to the red end of the spectrum, along with a hotter, more whitish 4,000K version.

The common practice is for bulb manufacturers to charge an extra buck for these color temperature outliers, but Green Creative offers them at no extra charge, which is nice to see.

The light output is also satisfyingly omnidirectional, which means that the bulb offers plenty of downward glow in addition to the light that shines up and out. That makes it a decent choice for a bedside reading lamp, or any other setting where even light distribution is key.

In addition to verifying each bulb's light output, color temperature and color rendering scores in our integrating sphere setup, we use a variac transformer to measure and confirm its power draw. Green Creative claims that the Titanium LED draws 9 watts, and that looks to be conservative, as we measured it at just under 8.5. Factor that in with the overperforming light output, and you're looking at efficiency that's closer to 98 lumens per watt -- still less than Osram, but only barely.

We also make sure to investigate how each bulb performs on dimmer switches. The Titanium LED did an acceptable job here, dimming smoothly on new Lutron and Leviton dimmers designed specifically for LEDs, and also on an old triac rotary-style dimmer intended for incandescents only.

We were able to dim the bulb down as low as 3.8 percent of its maximum brightness, which is a decent result, but we also detected a small amount of flicker at those minimum levels. The flicker wasn't consistent across each dimmer, and was most noticeable on the Leviton model, so keep in mind that your mileage may vary depending on the specific hardware in your home.

The verdict

All in all, the Green Creative Titanium LED is a perfectly decent bulb that offers strong, consistent performance across the board. As recently as last year, $14 would have been a very fair price for such a well-rounded LED option, and I likely wouldn't have had any trouble recommending it.

The lighting landscape is evolving quickly, though. By now, there are simply too many strong options available for $10 or less, including bulbs like the Osram 60W Replacement Ultra LED , which edges Green Creative out at nearly every turn of the spec sheet. I remain impressed with the quality of Green Creative's bulbs, and I'm looking forward to an upcoming high-CRI version of the Cloud LED, but unless the Titanium LED gets a price cut, it isn't a bulb I'd recommend.