Personally, I hate the look of any kind of flourescent bulb. The only bulbs I will use in my home or work shop, would be either Halogen or LED types. LED quality has improved quite a bit in the last couple of years, you get excellent brightness, long life, cooler running and in most cases, lower cost to buy and run.
Most of the ones sold in stores are the cool (blue) color temperature, or maybe neutral. The warm whites aren't as common, at least from what I've seen.
But you can get fluorescents and LEDs which put out light that is
very similar to incandescent or halogen, to the point that you'd be hard-pressed to tell the difference. As with many things though, with higher quality comes higher price. And in LEDs, because of the way they make white light, warmer light results in
less light, which means the marketing department can't put BIG numbers on the packaging. It's like what you've got in the digital camera arena. Megapixels are all that matter. It's a big number, and it's next to two big capital letters. Doesn't matter if it's a 50MP camera that spits out garbage that looks like a webcam from 1997. It's 50 megapixels! Likewise, it doesn't matter if you're getting 4000 lumens of light that looks like crap, versus 2500 that gives you excellent quality lighting. The one with bigger numbers tends to win.
Colored LEDs will always outperform white LEDs. This is why they tried the remote phosphor designs (yellow bulb). With remote phosphor, you can use cutting edge blue LEDs and turn the light white at the outer interface.
It looks like the general public didn't accept it... so they are abandoning the remote phosphor designs. Remote phosphor doesn't give you much more efficiency anyway.
I think the remote phosphor was done for manufacturing flexibility, which can translate to lower cost.
Got a remote phosphor layer? Great. Just throw "royal blue LED" in behind it, and you're good to go. The electronics can change as the technology improves, even to the point of using entirely different LED packaging with new circuitboard layouts. The phosphor coating is perfectly happy converting blue light, regardless of what the emitter looks like. And it's one less thing that they have to worry about while making the delicate LEDs.
As was discussed, that's just the most exterior layer.
All of the LED bulb designs, for anything greater than a few watts (i.e. all the household bulbs from Cree, Philips, etc - not night light or decorative bulbs, I've no idea about those), produce light with colored LEDs and filter the light accordingly. Either the filter is visible, or it's not.
Most LED-based white light is NOT made with white LEDs. White LEDs exist, but for actual white lighting, they generally either utilize a full combination of RGB LEDs, or they filter from an incomplete spectrum.
And we still don't have the holy grail RGB LED, for various reasons.
1) The light mix will vary over time as the LEDs age at different rates.
2) The light mix has to be tuned for the bins of LED. Due to normal variations in manufacturing, a single model of LED will have variations in brightness, drive voltage, and color output.
3) Green is a bastard, and it's partly the fault of your eyes. Our eyes are
very sensitive to green light. In that part of the spectrum, a shift in wavelength of 2
nanometers is visible as a color difference. A normal LED bin size is 5 nanometers wide, so even within a single bin, you can get visible variation. (If you order a specific bin of LED, you might get something that's 525-530 nanometers. If you order an LED from a place like Mouser, you might get anything from 520-540nm.) Compare that to red LEDs. A lot of LED manufacturers don't even offer bins for red. You get what they make, and that range could span 20+ nanometers. Some that
do break it down still don't fine-tune it. You can get 620-630nm, or 630-645. Your eyes aren't as sensitive to color shifts on that part of the spectrum, so it doesn't matter as much.
4) The output colors of LEDs don't quite match the peak absorption bands of our eyes - it'd be ideal of course if we could match their output to the inputs we're looking for. (The cheap pun is free. You're welcome.) So it's tough to produce true RGB lighting when the emitters aren't really the "correct" red, green, or blue.
I'll also throw in, as a fan of bright LEDs since "bright" meant "1000mcd....ooooOOOOOooohh!" ,
this is fun to play with. The way I'm driving it, it should be putting out around 3400 lumens, from a circle that's about 0.27in².
Pushed to maximum, it could exceed 5000 lumens. It would also be consuming close to 70 watts. Not all LEDs are "cool" or "low power."
The cool white emitters in that family would max out at 7000 lumens, for cool white that's more along the lines of a cheap fluorescent shop light.