Flicker-Free LED Lights, and Why They are Important to You

When i see in a Tiktok video i saw the finely designed room,its flicker in her video,i said its beautiful design,shortage is light flicker. She said i am wrong,just video effect, she is  only talking about visible flicker.Of course i am not arguing with her,  Cause even ERP in europe published long time,currently main manufacturer is rarely making flicker-free LED strip especially 230V high voltage ones.AS cost limited and involution,new technology can not best applied.

 I’ve been told more about bulb wiring lately, lights not free of invisible 120Hz flicker.and it turns out that the manufacturer needs to choose to put an extra circuit into the bulb (a DC-DC converter) to eliminate the 120 Hz flicker created by the AC mains. While the cost is adding. However, including the circuitry to make a bulb have zero flicker reduces its energy efficiency somewhat - these bulbs have somewhat low power factors. 

A power factor less than 1 means that some of the energy drawn into the bulb circuitry is lost as heat instead of being used directly to produce light. NEW ERP request bulbs need to have a power factor >= 0.7,( 5W<ligh<10W ,PF>0.5;10W<light<25W ,PF>0.7;25W<light, PF>0.9) Actually flicker-free, They have no flicker on a slow-motion video and they’re not causing pain or migraine. Their reviews are from a lot of grateful migraine patients. During a flicker migraine, I find flicker-free LEDs to be even better for me than some incandescents. Even low voltage strip lighting/industrial lighting that they advertise as "flicker-free" and that have PWM at 30KHz. Waveform lighting has lot articles to explain flicker-free, flicker-free places like in the classroom,protection students' eyes,patients, film and photography studios etc.

Now ,ERP,also the lighting industry is adopting less stringent "SVM" standards and a "Pst" standard that only applies to visible flicker.

Bulbs I’ve tested recently that are NOT flicker-free according to both slow-motion phone video (all have 120 Hz flicker) and according to my flicker-sensitive migraine brain.


I’m curious about a few things:

If you live in a country with 50 Hz AC power (so 100Hz flicker from AC), do the LED bulbs sold in your country today flicker at 100 Hz if you take a slow-motion video of them with your phone camera? I’m curious because 100 Hz is around the limit of being visible flicker for some people,  flicker shouldn’t be visible.

Flicker-free LED bulbs will not have any flashing or banding in the slow motion video. The light should look so steady that you'll double-check to see if you’re actually playing the video.

I get migraines from industrial LED strip lights with very subtle banding in the video in a pattern suggesting about 1500 Hz flicker. I also get migraines from every household LED bulb with 120 Hz flicker that I’ve ever encountered. I’ve never had a problem with household LEDs that have a 0.00 flicker index. I’ve never had a problem with LEDs that use constant DC power.