Why LED Quality Matters: How the Wrong Light Sources Ruin Great Lighting
Not all downlights are the same.
Why Even the Brightest Designs Can Fall Flat with the Wrong Hardware
You can have the most beautiful lighting design in the world — carefully layered scenes, artfully aimed beams, perfectly measured lux levels — and still end up with a room that feels about as inviting as a hospital corridor at 3 a.m.
Nine times out of ten, the culprit isn’t the design. It’s the fittings. The LED luminaires. The supposedly “same-spec” downlights someone found for half the price on a random supplier’s website.
This is why the right hardware — things like Orluna downlights or Lutron’s Lumaris LED tape — matter far more than most people realise. Because LEDs aren’t all born equal, and lighting control systems aren’t psychic.
A Lumen Is Not Just a Lumen
If you’ve ever tried to compare LEDs by their lumen figures, congratulations — you’ve already lost.
Two fittings might both claim 800 lumens, but that number tells you almost nothing about how they’ll perform in a real room.
Here’s the reality:
Optics and beam control – A good quality downlight with a precise beam and tight cutoff will place light exactly where you want it — worktops, art, your desk — while keeping glare to a minimum. A cheap look-alike will happily blind you while leaving the walls looking like a badly tuned projector.
Losses in the real world – Lighting designers work with lux levels, not just lumens. Swap a spec’d fitting for a random alternative, and suddenly your room looks like a cave lit by an iPhone torch.
Colour temperature mismatch – “2700 K” from one manufacturer might be a cosy candlelight; from another, it’s LED colour temperature roulet!
So yes, on paper, they’re “the same brightness”. In practice, one looks gorgeous and the other looks like a supermarket car park at closing time.
Colour Rendering: Bright, Yet Somehow Dead
Ever been in a kitchen where the surfaces look clean, but the food looks grey? That’s what happens when CRI — the Colour Rendering Index — is low.
You can have all the lumens in the world, but if the colour rendering’s off, you won’t see what’s actually there.
Low R9 values (the measure of how well reds are rendered) make faces look pale and timber tones vanish.
A fitting with a CRI of 98, like Orluna’s Origin engine, gives skin tones, fabrics, and artwork that rich, natural look that cheap LEDs can’t. That’s why Orluna are our number one pick for downlights
Is there any scientific backup to my claims? Sure. Researchers have shown that LEDs with poor spectral distribution distort our perception of colour — see this paper for the nerdy details.
In plain English: a £5 downlight might make your granite look fine, but your face will look like you haven’t slept in a week.
Flicker: The Problem You Feel Before You See
You know that weird headache you get after an hour in certain offices? That’s not stress. That’s flicker… or both!
LED flicker happens when dimming circuits, drivers, and control systems don’t quite get along. Some of it’s visible (the “strobe” effect you see when waving your hand under a cheap light). Some of it’s not — but your eyes and brain still notice.
Flicker causes fatigue, headaches, and a vague sense that the world isn’t quite right. (IEEE 1789 - “Recommending practices for modulating current in High Brightness LEDs for mitigating health risks to viewers” covers this in loving, sleep-destroying detail if you’re keen — read it here).
Lutron’s Lumaris tape, for instance, is designed for flicker-free dimming down to 0.1%. That’s not marketing fluff — it’s the difference between “lovely soft mood lighting” and “why is this room buzzing and making me dizzy?”.
Dimming & Compatibility: The Bit Everyone Gets Wrong
Lighting control is where most schemes come apart.
You’ve got phase-cut dimming, 0–10 V, DALI, DMX, all loving programmed into an advanced lighting control system such as Lutron HomeWorks QSX— and then someone plugs in an LED tape from eBay because “it’s 24 V, same thing, right?”
Cue:
Lights that never turn off.
Others that flicker when you sneeze.
Drivers that hum like a drunk bee.
Clients wondering why their £100k system behaves like a £5 dimmer switch.
The problem? Compatibility.
A Lutron Lumaris system, for example, is designed so the tape, driver, and control module speak the same electrical language. (Here’s the spec sheet if you’re into that kind of thing.)
When you mix brands without checking the control philosophy, you’re asking one manufacturer’s brain to read another’s handwriting.
It never ends well.
The Forgotten Hero: Drivers
The LED driver is the unsung hero of lighting. It’s the thing that quietly converts your mains voltage into the constant current or constant voltage your fittings actually need.
Get it wrong, and you’ll have:
Flicker
Colour shift
Burnt-out fittings
Random buzzing that’ll drive you mad
There’s an art to sizing drivers correctly — balancing load ranges, voltage drop, and thermal limits. It’s not glamorous work, but it’s what keeps a lighting design working perfectly for years, not months.
Think of drivers as the powertrain in a sports car. You can bolt in a cheap one and still get it off the line — but you’ll be calling a recovery truck before long.
When Great Designs Go Bad
It sometimes happens.
A well-considered lighting design is produced — complete with high-quality light sources, carefully selected drivers, and a control system built for seamless performance.
But somewhere between specification and installation, small changes creep in. A substitution here, a different driver there — often well-intentioned, but not always technically compatible.
The result can be lighting that doesn’t quite behave as expected: dimming that isn’t smooth, colours that feel slightly off, or control scenes that don’t transition properly.
It’s rarely the design or the technology at fault — usually just the delicate balance between the two being disturbed.
That’s why consistency from design through to commissioning matters so much. The right components, working together, turn a lighting plan into an experience.
Why Do We Trust Orluna and Lutron?
We don’t use Orluna and Lutron because the boxes look nice, although they do, and Orluna’s custom finishes are exquisite. We use them because they perform highly and behave.
Orluna Downlights:
CRI 98, high R9, no weird green tint.
Warm Dim options that glide from 3000 K to 1800 K like a real filament lamp.
Proper optics that light your room, not your eyelids.
Built to last, repairable, and designed for architectural use — not for the bargain bin.
Lutron Lumaris LED Tape:
90+ CRI, multiple colour temperatures, tunable white options (1800–4000 K).
Engineered for seamless dimming down to 0.1%.
Designed to integrate natively with Lutron HomeWorks and RadioRA 3.
These products are the lighting world’s equivalent of a perfectly indexed drivetrain: smooth, silent, and endlessly satisfying.
How We Keep Things Working as They Should
At Light Fantastic, we design lighting that works — visually, technically, and practically. That means:
We design around people, not just photometry.
We specify fittings and drivers that we know play nicely with modern control systems.
We check every detail: lumens, beam angles, CRI, load ranges, cable runs, and control protocols.
We commission properly — aiming beams, adjusting scenes, eliminating flicker.
We never, ever “value-engineer” a design into oblivion.
Lighting isn’t just about how much light you’ve got — it’s about what kind of light it is, how it behaves, and whether all the components are actually speaking to one another.
If you want your next project to look right, feel right, and work right — for years, not months — give us a call.
📞 01892 313181