If you do go the "smart home" route, stick with stuff that follows the Zigbee standard like Ikea's Tradfri line. The short version is that if you ever get tired of proprietary cloud app corporate nonsense, you can use the same hardware on an open-source system like Home Assistant. If possible, sticking to hardware on this list will save you a lot of time and headaches and money.

Usage mostly, I guess? My family was big on energy efficiency growing up so we were always on the lookout for better fluorescent bulbs, and dang near celebrated when an incandescent got replaced with one--and the rare occasion where an older fluorescent burned out and could be replaced with something more efficient. Got real familiar with color temperature thanks to that.

I also am old enough that I got to watch blue and white LEDs show up on the market in real time as components, then flashlights, then bulbs. I've always had a penchant for electronics so I had piles of loose LEDs around.

Combine that with some outdoorsiness and untrustworthy infrastructure and I had a good collection of weird flashlights when I was a kid. When the first LED flashlights showed up, it was a complete game changer in terms of battery life and brightness. For a while the go-to for us was just blue LED keychain lights because they were dirt cheap, lasted forever, and were brighter than the old lights.

Eventually, this xkcd triggered my sleeper-agent programming and I went nuts with "enthusiast" flashlights. That led to "shit, these are brighter than my room lighting, better fix that"--and a 3 lb 5000 lumen LED corncob designed for gymnasiums dangling over my couch.

Nowadays, thanks to their low power draw, absurd output, and improved heat management you can stick a 6000 lumen photon cannon in a little reading lamp meant for a 40 watt incandescent.

If you're hunting for good bulbs, the big light quality differentiators are color temp, CRI, and flicker. Dimmable & brightness needs vary.

• Color Temp: ≤3500K is cozy, 4000-4500K feels neutral, 5000k+ is blue. Yes, lower numbers are "warmer" and higher numbers are "cooler" and I will never not be mad about those terms
• Color Rendering Index (CRI): the higher the better. LEDs don't necessarily produce a continuous spectrum like incandescents do
  • 60 is the worst waiting room you've ever been in
  • 80 is comparable to your average office fluorescent tubes
  • 90 is getting pretty good, easily enough for places you aren't spending all your time
  • 95+ is top tier LEDs, things will look right
  • 100 is daylight from the sun/incandescence, the standard that defines the scale
• Flicker: honestly if anyone is still making AC LED bulbs that noticeably flicker/strobe they should be tarred and feathered but it's still something to watch out for in product reviews.

If you get real nerdy about it LEDs also inherently have a tint because the white phosphor blend is gonna have a peak somewhere in the spectrum but that isn't usually relevant--it's only notable when that peak doesn't align with the color temperature. The flashlight folks tend to speak fondly of rosy/pink and despise green.