Ordinary, transparent amber from the drugstore.
Tunable LEDs may overtake phosphor-converted bulbs in efficiency by the 2030s. Royer remains hopeful and is encouraged by the continued search for improvement. The LED industry is still trying to develop an efficient green LED to go with the red, blue, and amber ones.
The Department of Energy notes that programming the bulb controls "may not be intuitive," that tunable whites won't necessarily match any other whites, and that colors may come out "cartoonlike." And they won't save as much electricity. They have different colored LEDs inside, instead of simply phosphor-treated blue ones. If you don't mind spending extra money - say, three or four times as much per bulb, plus a $60 controller - and fooling around inside an app, you can get color-tunable lightbulbs today. Speaking of which, manufacturers are happy to game (or lie) about Color Rendering Index: the 90+ CRI bulb you bought on Amazon is likely as bad if not worse than the honest crap you can get at the store. With restrictions on incandescents kicking in, get ready for an indoor world that looks bleak, sickly and gray unless you're prepared to fork out for expensive high-CRI bulbs. The mix of colored diodes in the bulb will superficially appear to give out a white of a certain warmth or coolness, but the poor color index is revealed in the color of everything it lands on. If you buy an LED screw bulb, already the default on many store shelves, it will likely be a piece of junk presenting a low color spectrum and inferior longevity. Stock art highlights how depressing and lifeless commodity LED screw bulbs are.