> You also need to consider outdoor lighting such as sodium vapor lamps have much lower colour temperatures of around 1700K, where as off-the-shelf LED bulbs only go as low as 2500K.
I adore sodium vapor lamps. I realize they aren't as "bright" at night, and some people prefer that (largely for safety), but the old lights aren't just romantic - they're less offensive to our senses. They aren't nearly as distracting or, quite frankly, ugly. I feel like modern LED lights are ruining entire cities with their blue glow.
I really don't like LED lights. Even compared to fluorescents, which are pretty horrible. They replaced all the fluorescent lights at my work a while back with LED's and for the first month all my coworker's were complaining about sore eyes and headaches, they hurt my eyes, they're hard to look at, they even mess with calibrating the lasers on our machines. It's been more difficult since the bulbs were changed. Sometimes the laser doesn't read the calibration lens properly. This didn't happen before.
Probably shitty LED bulbs with poor drive circuitry. Eye strain is usually caused by flicker, which often comes from bulbs that use PWM (cheap dimmable bulbs) or don’t have large enough capacitors (or any at all and just rely on a diode and resistor to manage voltage, so you end up suffering from 50/60hz flicker, frequently half wave rectified making it even worse).
I love sodium vapor lights. I find it to be a very pleasing monochromatic glow that makes me excited be walking around town after dark. I think I especially came to be aware of them as in college my campus had them, and it made for some fantastic night photography around the school.
My dream would be to have some type of consumer version of them, I would love to put them in my exterior lights, but that doesn't really seem to be a thing....
You can totally get sodium vapor lamps on amazon. They are popular as grow lamps. A quick search bough up listings for both high and low pressure sodium lamps, and ballasts
I adore sodium vapor lamps. I realize they aren't as "bright" at night, and some people prefer that (largely for safety), but the old lights aren't just romantic - they're less offensive to our senses. They aren't nearly as distracting or, quite frankly, ugly. I feel like modern LED lights are ruining entire cities with their blue glow.