@Gonefarrell: I will investigate the K figures. Something new to digest.
As others have said, color temperature can vary according to purpose. We put a "rope" of ~5000°K "natural" white (sometimes aka "cool" aka "bright") LEDs in our engine room; great for task lighting. The rest of our interior LEDs are 2700°K "warm" lights, softer and more suitable for living spaces. The red LEDs, with fewer diodes on each disc, that we put in the flybridge lighting is better for night vision. The 3NM anchor light is probably ~5000°K and it's very BRIGHT! MUCH brighter than the original 3NM incandescent.
But the lighting is significantly dimmer than before, to the point where I may have to redo the bulbs again.
Yep, this is one where brightness measurements like lumens or candela can guide the purchase.
I converted my boat lights to LED and the wife forced me to return them to --- the LEDs were too white and not suited to the boat so she said
That those pesky Kelvin color temperatures, again. Easily fixed.
Interesting thought. Are 12V LEDs 'dimmable'? This happened to me tonight. I had to install a dimmer on the Kitchen switch to make it palatable. Are all LEDs dimmable?
All LEDs aren't, but many (maybe most, these days) are... and it depends more on what you dimmer mechanism is. There are (IIRC) three different kinds, and the more common recent one seems to work with most LEDs. At least it did in our case.
Two other issues to take into account are heat and voltage.
The earlier G4s that we installed in the interior and some of the red LEDs began to lose individual diodes, most likely from voltage swing on the boat. The replacements were from marinebeam.com, units said to be able to deal with 10-30VDC current... so there's enough play in there for both 12V and 24V systems, even at bulk-absorption charge voltage.
The earlier ones were also showing signs of excessive heat on the backplane, when we replaced those. The bits and pieces on the backplane of the new marinebeam systems appeared to be much more complicated than the earlier ones. I've forgotten most of everything I knew about circuirty 50 years ago, so I dunno what all that was... but presumably these new ones won't burn the boat down.
-Chris