Customer Reviews

GE 75408 26-Watt CFL Spiral Reveal Light Bulb, 100-Watt Equivalent

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

Here is the bad news first. Unfortunately for fans of the GE Reveal incandescent light, this bulb isn't even close to the same color temperature. This CFL has a lower (yellower) color temperature. However, this CFL is a very good reproduction of an of a 100W GE soft white incandescent light bulb. GE should have marketed this CFL is the new "Soft White" series and renamed the existing soft white line as their generic line. I do not know why GE chose to put a blue cap on the CFL to identify it as a reveal. This will make it ugly for fixtures where the cap is visible. Why not simply print "Reveal" in blue lettering on the side?

At first glance the light from this bulb may not look much different than the other CFLs bulbs on the market which are much cheaper. However if you look more closely at light you will notice that it looks much more vivid than the artificial looking yellow haze of most other CFLs.

One reason why CFLs sometimes look bad is because unlike incandescent lamps CFLs can't produce all of the colors in the light spectrum evenly. If you look at sunlight or an ordinary light bulb through a prism, you will get a perfect rainbow. If you look at a florescent lamp though a prism you will only see various bands of Red,Orange,Green, Cyan, and Purple light. It is a limitation of the technology. If you look at a GE reveal CFL light bulb through a prism instead of narrow green and cyan colored bands of light, there is a wide band of green light that fades to cyan. The human eye is most sensitive to green light so a more accurate production of green light produces more accurate colors. The enhanced green spectrum is what makes this lamp unique.

Overall this lamp is worth a try for those who are still unsatisfied with the light quality of CFLs. However the high price of $5.00 per bulb makes it very expensive to switch over an entire room.

I was excited to find these new CFL bulbs by GE. I was disappointed to find that despite the premium price, these bulbs don't look much different than standard a "soft white" CFL (±3000k). They have a more yellow cast than Reveal incandescent bulbs. The Reveal CFL bulbs may come closer to matching traditional (non-Reveal) incandescent bulbs. Like most fluorescent bulbs, they still suffer from a lower CRI than a traditional bulbs. This makes some colors dull (blue and red), while exaggerating others (green and yellow). If you must use CFL's and you want ones that come close to Reveal incandescent bulb, try the BlueMax Sunset CFL. The Bluemax Sunset bulbs are not perfect and still have minor color issues but they are what the Reveal CFL's should have been.

We have a very nice deep gold wall color that looks fantastic during the day. At night, however, the room turns on you. Our normal CFL illumination would reflect from the walls a very sickly tinge of green -- as in "what did you eat? get to the hospital!". I tried hard to ignore it, but never quite could. In fact, I had gone back to using incandescents for the room, but recently tried a GE Reveal CFL on a whim. Instant room makeover. In fact, we put three lamps: normal CFL, incandescent, and Reveal CFL in three corners of the room one evening for a test. The Reveal provided far and away the best overall color.. a nice relaxing warm gold, somewhat warmer than when daylight illuminated, but with *none* of the sickly green I had long assumed was an unavoidable artifact of CFLs. Now maybe this was an unusual interaction with my wall color, but if you have a case of the greens, these are definitely worth a try.

One minor nitpick: likely due to the different phosphor formulation, they use slightly more power at the same light output. Well worth it (and their additional cost) in my view.

I rarely post a review. For this product I felt like I had to. The product DOES NOT WORK! Do not buy!

I tried the incandescent bulbs in the past labeled "Reveal" and I was very happy with their "natural" light (full-spectrum).
This bulb claims "Specially made to filter out the dull yellow rays". I think the engineering got it wrong and made the bulb filter everything EXCEPT dull yellow rays.

I tried them in my kitchen and found the light was VERY yellow. I thought it could be the lamp, so I brought it into my office where I am using another brand of a "full-spectrum" compact florescent bulb that does give "white" light. This product still gave a yellow color, very noticeable when contrasting the two.

The color from this bulb looks like the ugly yellow of a bug light. Was this product even tested!?

GE goes down a notch in my quality company books on this one.

After going back and forth on a few other CFLs and a few trips to the return desk at Walmart and Lowes, I ended up getting the GE Reveals. The light quality honestly looks like a regular 100w incandescent, to my eyes, but at a quarter of the wattage. That's a win in my book.

I would say that they don't reproduce the light quality of the regular incandescent Reveal line which I have in a few rooms in my house, but I'll take it given that I get pretty much the same light output for a quarter of the electricity bill. If you buy these expecting the same results as a standard incandescent Reveal, you'll probably be disappointed. If you buy these looking for the most incandescent-like light output from a CFL, you'll be pleasantly surprised.

For the negative reviews that found the light too dim or color too blue or too yellow: it's important to let the bulb warm up before judging the light quality or brightness. My wife and I both found the light output from the Reveal to be warm like an incandescent once it warmed up (about 2-3 minutes). We tend to leave the light on throughout the evening, so it's not a problem for us.

I docked one star for what seems to be some quality control issues and flimsy packaging. The first pack I bought had one burn out the second I turned it on. Should have known something was up as it was crooked on the base. That said, I love these so much that I'd replace all the other CFLs in my house with these Reveal CFLs when they die out. Hope they expand the range. The Amazon price is great given that the lowest price I found in a brick-and-mortar was just a few cents higher once I factored in sales tax.

I've used incandescent reveal bulbs for years. Because I'm a jeweler I need very good true color lighting. This bulb is the best compact fluorescent I've ever used. It really looks like an incandescent reveal bulb. I'm still using it with reveal incandescents, and haven't moved entirely to this reveal compact fluorescent style yet, but I'm pleased with it thus far and intend to switch over. I'll update this reveiew if I cahnge my mind about them, but at this point I am pleased.

As some reviewers have pointed out, the light emitted from these bulbs pales in comparison to traditional GE reveal bulbs. But that problem is nothing compared to the horrible experience we have had with the life of these bulbs. We began replacing our traditional GE reveal bulbs in our home office starting last January (the office has 17 recessed can lights). Of the ten bulbs that we've replaced with the reveal spiral bulbs, seven no longer work. Yep. Burned out in a matter of weeks or months despite the claim that they last five years. And these bulbs are not inexpensive. This 5-year-life claim is flat-out fraudulent. GE should be ashamed for producing such an awful product.

I bought a case of these and replaced all of my bulbs with the reveal cfl's. They would last on average just a few days. Some made for a couple of weeks but some made it only a few hours. GE had me mail the bad bulbs to them and sent me a coupon for replacement bulbs. I bought a new case of reveal cfl's at a different store just in case it was a bad shipment and they all did exactly the same thing and lasted on a few days. The color on these is very nice and I really wanted to like them but this is a lot of money to have them all burn out in less than a week!

I bought three of these bulbs, two with very acceptable color -- not much different from good full-spectrum incandescents, very pleasing. The third, in identical packaging, was horrid -- yellow, with unpleasant associations of rancid and worse -- nothing you would want to bathe a room in. The wide variation in this bulb's reviewer ratings may be due less to rater subjectivity and more to inconsistent quality control at GE. Maybe there are different suppliers? Don't know -- I didn't go through the fine details of the packaging. My impression is that some of the bulbs marketed as Reveal fluorescents are as great as the most enthusiastic raters describe, and others are downright nasty. If you buy, you are taking a gamble, and be prepared to ask for a refund.

These lights look nice when they work, which isn't for long. I've owned 8 of them now, 4 have failed. I was able to return 6 to a local vendor. Some fail within days, the longest they have lasted is 2 months. The last one almost burnt me when I removed it, it wasn't on but it sure was HOT! Stay away from these things. They're junk.