# Product Review: Lowe's Utilitech LED 7.5W = 40W



## Electric_Light

After it was mentioned to me here, I have acquired a several samples of Utilitech (Lowe's private brand) A19 7.5W LED lamp intended to replace 40W standard incandescent.

Product comes in two variations under the same UPC. One is 435lm another is 450 lm. They're both rated at 3,000K CCT.

A normal A19 incandescent is around 500 lm, rated at 1,500 hrs and 25c/each in a 4 pack. 

The retail price is $20. 









The good:
It is on the cheaper end of LED products. 
It is dimmable.
Comes on fairly quick, but with a noticeable delay when it is side by side with an incandescent or instant start CFL.

The bad:
The color quality does not live up to incandescent lamp. It is not as good as Philips AmbientLED(that is $40). 
Significantly heavier than incandescent lamps which limits use in some telescoping type lamps. 
The radiance in 90-180 degrees is almost zero, so it will not produce even lighting in fixtures utilizing this portion of radiance.
Visibly noticeable color variation was observed between samples. 

Although dimmable, it does not dim and start in dimmed state as smoothly as Philips AmbientLED. 

Flicker was checked using a patterned top designed for this purpose and it was found to have more line frequency flicker than CFL. Linear fluorescent lamps on poor quality ballast also exhibit enough flicker detectable by this method, however high quality CFLs and linear lamps on high quality ballasts do not produce detectable amount of flicker by this method. 

The color on some samples were pretty close, some looked closer to 4,100K fluorescent. Flicker and poor color quality are my primary objections to this product.

Finally, there was a significant amount of previously opened and returned products on the shelf at Lowe's.


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