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).
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.
