Soraa Radiant 60W Replacement LED review: Exceptional color quality from the Soraa Radiant LED

If you're shopping for new light bulbs, then you might be thinking about common lighting concerns like brightness and efficiency. Soraa, a lighting startup based out of California, hopes that you consider color quality, too. After years of developing light fixtures for color-conscious commercial settings like restaurants and museums, the company is now offering consumers residential lighting options, as well. Front and center among them: the Soraa Radiant 60W Replacement LED, which sells for $14 plus shipping (pro-tip: it's Prime eligible on Amazon).

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Soraa Radiant 60W Replacement LED

The Good

Soraa's Radiant LED delivers on its promise of outstanding color quality, and unlike similar GE Reveal bulbs, it's satisfyingly bright, too. It also dimmed perfectly on modern dimmer switches.

The Bad

We saw some occasional flicker issues on older dimmer switches from the pre-LED age. The bulb is also slightly less efficient than other 60W replacement LEDs because of the way it boosts color quality.

The Bottom Line

This bulb isn't cheap by today's standards, but it's worth it for the eye-popping color quality and strong dimming performance.

That's obviously pretty expensive for a single 60W replacement bulb, but Soraa has some legitimate lighting chops. The company's founder, Shuji Nakamura, is a Nobel Prize-winning engineer whose work basically made the modern LED light bulb possible in the first place.

For that reason, I was eager to test the Radiant LED, particularly its claims of superior color quality. Unlike incandescent bulbs, which emit lots of energy from the invisible, infrared part of the spectrum, LEDs aren't always great at illuminating red tones, and many cast a yellowy tinge over objects that would otherwise look white. The Radiant LED promises to fix both problems, partly by way of a clever trick that shifts certain tones towards the red end of the spectrum.

If that went over your head, don't worry -- the elevator pitch is that this bulb promises to make the colors in your home pop better than other LEDs. More on that in just a bit.

Let's start with the basics, beginning with brightness. The Radiant LED claims a light output of 800 lumens, which would put it right on par with a 60W incandescent. I measured it at a satisfying 820 lumens -- brightness: check.

Next, color temperature, which gives you a sense of a bulb's specific tone of white light. The most popular default option is a warm, yellowy 2,700 K, which is what the Radiant LED promises. In our integrating sphere, our spectrometer clocked the bulb at a nearly spot-on 2,699 K. It looks good to the naked eye, too. Color temperature: check.

As for longevity, the Radiant LED claims a lifespan of 25,000 hours, which equates to well over 20 years at an average of three hours per day of use. That's better than the current average, as manufacturers have started scaling back on the rated lifespans of their bulbs in order to bring costs down. Soraa also backs the bulb with a 5-year warranty. Check and check.

As for efficiency, the bulb puts its light out from a power draw of 11 watts, which is fine, but slightly higher and less efficient than the average 60W replacement LED. That's because the light output loses a little bit of energy due to that color-shifting trick I mentioned earlier. It's a fair trade -- if Soraa hadn't bumped the wattage up, the bulb wouldn't be bright enough. And in the end, we're talking about a difference of pennies per year on your energy bill. Call it a check minus, and only by the slimmest of margins.

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Now for those big color quality claims. To my eye, the Radiant LED does, in fact, do an outstanding job of rendering vivid, accurate colors, particularly the reds and whites promised in the pitch. In fact, it's one of the best color quality results that I've seen from an LED to date.

That said, the effect is pretty subtle when you're comparing it against modern competitors from the local lighting aisle. Most name-brand bulbs have seen at least a slight uptick in color quality over the past few years thanks to heightened competition, with color rendering scores often approaching the upper 80s out of 100. Soraa's LED finishes comfortably in the 90s, but as you can tell from that comparison to common 60W replacement bulbs from Cree and Sylvania, the difference might be less dramatic than you'd expect.

The other comparison of note is to the GE Reveal line of light bulbs, all of which filter out excess yellow tones in order to boost overall color quality. They work great and typically offer colors that are right on par with Soraa -- but they don't account for the loss of brightness by boosting the wattage like Soraa does, and that means that most of them aren't as bright as you'd expect. I prefer Soraa's approach, and at $14, the bulb costs about the same as a comparably bright, dimmable GE Reveal bulb.

Speaking of dimming, that ended up being another of the Radiant LED's strengths. Soraa promises silent, buzz-free dimming, and it delivered across every switch I tested it with (I could barely hear any buzz with my ear pressed against the bulb). It also dimmed down nice and low on all of my switches, hitting a consistent average of 6.7 percent brightness at minimum, and topping out at a perfect 100 percent at each switch's maximum setting.

The only problem I encountered was a slight, occasional strobing flicker that would briefly appear at low settings on an old rotary dial that isn't even intended for use with LEDs in the first place. If you use switches like that, then maybe consider skipping this bulb for something else.

All in all, the Soraa Radiant LED feels like the lighting upgrade that it's pitched as (and priced as). At $14, it costs twice as much as some other dimmable options in the 60W replacement category, so don't get it unless you really have a use for that uptick in color quality. But if you do, then I doubt you'll be disappointed.