Warning: Rant Ahead!
When I was a kid, my first major collection was light bulbs (don't laugh!). There were so many different styles, bases, vintages, applications, etc and most were available on a kid's allowance. How cool to power up a real Edison-Mazda lamp and experience living history when you're in 6th grade!
Then one day CFL's arrived. At first there was only one on store shelves, the Philips Earth Light. It was a monstrous affair and cost over $20 a bulb back in the mid 90's. The light output was lousy, the temp operating range, even worse, but it was billed as lasting over 20 years, and this thing was really built. If you were willing to spend that much money on a lightbulb you expected some quality.
Since that day the light quality has gotten much better, warm up times have been reduced, but the lamps themselves are total junk. But what do you expect when you're trying to compete with an incandescent lamp that costs pennies to manufacture? Open one up sometime- the absolute cheapest electronic components slapped together with barely enough solder to keep the parts in place. Parts counts have been slashed each year in order to reduce cost, but at the expense of safety, longetivity and radio interference suppression. Not only do you have a switching power supply running in each of these lamps, but the low-V parts require rectification and voltage drop, and a decent design will also have components monitoring initial current draw during tube 'firing', steady-current regulation to maintain brightness, thermal protection, switching supply isolation from mains, perhaps ferrites for RFI and the parts necessary to handle end of life use (igniting and maintaining output). A lot of this stuff gets cut to save cost, especially on the cheaper Chinese units. Yes, I realize these lamps save on the energy bill, but at what cost? Too much radiated RF hash, too much money to China, and needless complexity for a light bulb.
