-Hey, I'm CNET's Ry Crist.
And today we are taking a look at the SWITCH Infinia LED bulb.
This is a 10-watt LED that is designed to replace a 60-watt incandescent.
It puts out 800 lumens worth of light and shines at a color temperature of 2,700 degrees Kelvin.
The SWITCH bulb claims to last 25,000 hours before burning out, which is 25 years if you run in for 3 hours a day that puts it on par with almost every other LED bulb that we've looked at.
Unlike
some other LEDs though, the SWITCH is a good bulb when it comes to turning on and turning off quickly.
It's instantaneous.
It doesn't have that one second delay that we've seen from other bulbs like this utility type pro-bulb.
At a price of $11.99 per bulb, this is an affordable LED replacement if you're looking to upgrade your lights.
The question is, how it is stuck up against other affordable LED replacement lights that we've looked at before.
Well, let's take a look.
Here we've got the Philips slim-style LED.
This is an affordable low cost LED from Philips that just came up this year.
It's got
a unique flat design that is very interesting no one else doing a quite like that in the major manufacturing space.
It produces this sort of shadow areas up and down here if you look.
You can see them if I spin the light and you don't love that.
But it's still a pretty good bulb and definitely a good price.
Here in the middle, I've got the Cree 60-watt replacement bulb.
This is an excellent soft white bulb with the nice yellowy incandescent hue and it's one of our favorite bulbs with 10-year warranty.
And finally here on the right, we've got the SWITCH Infinia 60-watt
replacement bulb and you can see that it's a lot like Cree bulb both in terms of its brightness and color temperature and it boasted in a low into the car temperature scale and they both have 800 lumens, so that makes a lot of sense.
There's not a whole lot separating to in light quality if you ask me and the price is about the same too.
The SWITCH retails for $11.99, the Cree bulb retails for about $12.97 and they're both cheaper if you get those energy rebates.
The Cree bulb has that 10-year warranty but the switch bulb is very interesting because it's offering a life time warranty
for residential use.
So if you buy this bulb and it burns up ever, you can return it and get a new one.
That's very cool.
That's a lot of reassurance for consumers who aren't quite ready to trust that LEDs are gonna last to 25 and 30 years that the manufacturers are promising.
But there are other distinctions between the Cree bulb and the SWITCH bulb.
The Cree has the sort of fancy color, a guy might wear in the 16th century and that just the heat sink that dissipates the heat from the bulb.
The color on the SWITCH bulb is more like something you put on a sick dog.
It's got very simple
design.
You can't really see the heat sinks and it doesn't really put out a lot of heat when you're running and so that's a good thing too.
At 6 ounces, the SWITCH bulb is also a lot heavier than the 3.8-ounce Cree bulb.
So if you've got a flex lamp or something that needs a lighter weight bulb, you probably wanna go with Cree over SWITCH.
But all that said, these are both very good bulbs and I'm really glad that a bulb as good as Cree has got some really solid competition here.
That's only a good thing for the consumer.
For CNET, I'm Ry Crist.
