With the rods of the eye. Your eye doesn’t consist entirely of rods.
The Wikipedia article says that your cones should be more-sensitive to flashing at higher frequencies than the rods. The rods are what are what pick up light when you’re viewing something through the corner of your eye. What I experience with these bulbs is the opposite of what I’d expect from that: flashing is noticeable and annoying when viewed in my peripheral vision, but gone (well, or on the edge of noticeability) when in the center of my vision.
EDIT: Well, to be fair, I guess I don’t actually know that they don’t have some sort of power control circuitry, haven’t pulled one apart, so I guess I shouldn’t say that they’re 60 Hz. But unlike typical LED bulbs, they’re narrow; these corncob bulbs don’t have the bulge for space for an electronic ballast. If they don’t have the ballast, I’d be expecting them to run off the wall power directly.
I wonder if I can go dig up a datasheet somewhere.
EDIT2: None of the technical material talks about any frequency of the bulb, but you might be right. There’s one other thing power-control thing that you can stick in a bulb that might take up space, and that’s a dimmable power supply. Like, if the wall power voltage drops, those will detect and reduce brightness. This one’s non-dimmable. Maybe that’s where the bulge at the base of LED bulbs comes from — dimmer electronics — and there’s enough space to fit non-dimmable electronics up inside the body of the bulb.
EDIT3: No, it’s not dimmability that determines the bulge. I see corncob lights with no bulge that are dimmable and corncob lights with a bulge that are not dimmable. But that also invalidates my reasoning above – you have to have power regulation circuitry to make dimmable LED lights work, because that requires a variable-PWM source, and if it’s possible to build dimmable bulbs with no bulge at the base, then I can’t assume that no bulge means that LED bulbs are being driven straight off wall power without power regulation, which was my original assumption. Sorry, this is probably my error then. These are probably being driven by an electronic ballast at some frequency higher than 60 Hz, just still low enough to be within the range that I can still see.
Yeah that’s still normal. Unless we’re both just special. When looking at the center of a 60Hz CRT, the flickering is seen around the edges of the screen where I am not focusing. Or the whole screen if I look to the side of it. I also perceive LEDs flickering the same way you describe.
I’d guess the fact that we are not seeing it in our focus vision probably has less to do with physical attributes of the eye and more to do with the way our brains create our perception of vision. There’s a lot going on there. Like our eyes are also constantly rapidly moving, and we are not conscious of or perceive that movement, there are 2 blind spots in our vision where our optic nerves connect to our retinas that we don’t perceive, and our brain invents the color that we perceive in our peripheral vision, which cannot physically be detected by the eye. Vision is weird and complicated.
With the rods of the eye. Your eye doesn’t consist entirely of rods.
The Wikipedia article says that your cones should be more-sensitive to flashing at higher frequencies than the rods. The rods are what are what pick up light when you’re viewing something through the corner of your eye. What I experience with these bulbs is the opposite of what I’d expect from that: flashing is noticeable and annoying when viewed in my peripheral vision, but gone (well, or on the edge of noticeability) when in the center of my vision.
EDIT: Well, to be fair, I guess I don’t actually know that they don’t have some sort of power control circuitry, haven’t pulled one apart, so I guess I shouldn’t say that they’re 60 Hz. But unlike typical LED bulbs, they’re narrow; these corncob bulbs don’t have the bulge for space for an electronic ballast. If they don’t have the ballast, I’d be expecting them to run off the wall power directly.
I wonder if I can go dig up a datasheet somewhere.
EDIT2: None of the technical material talks about any frequency of the bulb, but you might be right. There’s one other thing power-control thing that you can stick in a bulb that might take up space, and that’s a dimmable power supply. Like, if the wall power voltage drops, those will detect and reduce brightness. This one’s non-dimmable. Maybe that’s where the bulge at the base of LED bulbs comes from — dimmer electronics — and there’s enough space to fit non-dimmable electronics up inside the body of the bulb.
EDIT3: No, it’s not dimmability that determines the bulge. I see corncob lights with no bulge that are dimmable and corncob lights with a bulge that are not dimmable. But that also invalidates my reasoning above – you have to have power regulation circuitry to make dimmable LED lights work, because that requires a variable-PWM source, and if it’s possible to build dimmable bulbs with no bulge at the base, then I can’t assume that no bulge means that LED bulbs are being driven straight off wall power without power regulation, which was my original assumption. Sorry, this is probably my error then. These are probably being driven by an electronic ballast at some frequency higher than 60 Hz, just still low enough to be within the range that I can still see.
Yeah that’s still normal. Unless we’re both just special. When looking at the center of a 60Hz CRT, the flickering is seen around the edges of the screen where I am not focusing. Or the whole screen if I look to the side of it. I also perceive LEDs flickering the same way you describe.
I’d guess the fact that we are not seeing it in our focus vision probably has less to do with physical attributes of the eye and more to do with the way our brains create our perception of vision. There’s a lot going on there. Like our eyes are also constantly rapidly moving, and we are not conscious of or perceive that movement, there are 2 blind spots in our vision where our optic nerves connect to our retinas that we don’t perceive, and our brain invents the color that we perceive in our peripheral vision, which cannot physically be detected by the eye. Vision is weird and complicated.