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We finally ditched all the incandescent bulbs at my parents' house in the UK, in favour of LED ones.
One set just uses flat-faced LED's and the effect is good because they run against a white siding and light it up in triangles.
The others have a diffuser lens over them like more traditional lights and that seems to have been designed quite well that they still have that "twinkle".
Only thing that's slightly offputting is the control box does allsorts of fancy things like fade/chase but it's all done via pulse modulation, so when the LED's are "dim" they have a real short blip of light and a long pause, gives a somewhat ugly flicker. Why they can't use PWM to charge a smoothing capacitor I'll never know, but they are very good on electrics.
We also have a string of 16 yellow LED's that are powered off 4 "AA" batteries which go around the bookcase, and those stay on solidly and the batteries last about four days. It again pulses the bulbs in sequence (seems 8 are wired positive, 8 negative) and the box puts out an AC square wave. This appears to save power somehow.
--Phil
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