The standard household
incandescent light bulb is a glass container emitting bright white light equally in all directions. Except it's not
bright at all, but relatively very
dull - even for the 160
watt bulbs, and
magnitudes lower in intensity than
natural daylight. And it's not actually white light either, but rather a very
mundane, washed out
creamy colour. How cream you ask? Well,
very cream. In fact so cream, that if you were to represent this colour in
RGB, you'd get a hue containing around...
Red: 49%
Green: 33%!
Blue: only 18%!!
This orangey hue generally applies to all common wattages (40 - 200 W). See this URL for a demonstration:
http://www.skytopia.com/project/light/creambulb.png
Yes, it's true. A proper white bulb would need around one and a half times the amount of green light, and almost three times as much blue light. The thing you must remember is that stuff looks less apparently orange when everything around is also tinted with the same color. The eye 'adapts' and creates a new standard for 'white' according to what it sees - which is why you don't usually notice the 'oranginess'.
OK, so
Halogen and
Fluorescent bulbs (especially
cool white fluorescents) can often be a little brighter and whiter, but not everybody's going to be able to fit this type of bulb in their
living room. Also, fluorescents tend to suffer from
irritating flicker and buzzing noises.
Some studies have shown that
brighter, whiter light will increase our happiness and productivity, but we're stuck with
dull,
creamy,
inefficient light bulbs that fail to show the true colours of objects. Combine this with the fact they eventually
conk out, and you have a device that really belongs to the
stone age.