22 Watts isn't much of an efficiency advance over the CFL lamps, but of course they make up for it in longevity.
I'm just not sure it's worth the price difference at the moment.

Well thought out and researched articles like this make Gizmag a real cut above the rest. Good work!!

@Wombat56, if you are only talking about 100w equiv in cost alone CFL is cheaper even over like 5 years of operation. 22 watts vs the last CFL I tested at 25 watts.
A difference of 3 watts if left on for a year would be 26.28 kWh/year. For residential electrical costs of about 11 cents/kWh it would only save about $2.89/year. At current prices (~$55 for LED, $2 for CFL) it would take about 18 years for the LED to end up cheaper.
If you compare the LED to an incandescent 100w bulb however the savings for using the LED is $6/month and even at current prices it would pay for itself in under 9 months.
There are other advantages to LED though like longer lifespan, more durability, no hazardous materials to clean up if you break one etc. I once dropped a LED light from high enough up doing construction to break the lamp but the LED was fine.
100w replacement LED bulbs are still expensive because they are new but you can buy 40w and 60w replacement bulbs for $10 to $14 at home depot. You can buy a 6 pack of 40w replacement bulbs for the cost of the 100w equivalent Philips and most home lighting situations don't need 100w equivalency.
It wasn't that long ago (about 5 years ago I think) that those bulbs were $50 and $60 each so I am sure the 100w equivalent bulbs will drop in price before long as well.

I still don't see a cycle rating. Cfl's were advertised as lasting 5 times as long as incandescent bulbs and if you turned them on and never turned them off they might.In actual use they don't near that long. Cycling is what kills them, it has nothing to do with run time. I would expect led's to do better, but if I was rating light bulbs I would at least acknowledge that fact. If you are going to rate a bulb for 25,000 hrs it should have to go through a 25,000 cycle test. Wouldn't take but 3 days to do it with a 10 second cycle.

I am a fan of LEDs, but I have two small corrections to make to the payback calculation above. 1. You need to consider the interest on the money used to buy the $55 LED. If you had put the money in the bank instead, you would have earned interest. If you had paid the money off your mortgage, you would have saved even more in interest. Suddenly, your saving of $2.89 per year is more like zero. This is a basic piece of economics, and you need to make sure it is taken into account whenever someone tells you about the 'payback' period (for instance on solar panels on your roof). 2. On a more positive note, CFLs only last a couple of years if left on full time, so you would have to buy about 9 of them over 18 years. And that's a lot of mercury to put into the environment.

@kraftzion
That makes sense. The CFL's in out bathroom lighting kept burning out. They are this style: http://i.imgur.com/zGomDJu.jpg
I was thinking they may have been too poorly ventilated or something in that fixture but it didn't really click how they would be cycled more often than other locations in our home.
We replaced 2 of them with LED about a year ago and so far the LED's are still going strong. We have 5 or 6 LED's in total from different manufacturers so far around our home and no failures yet. Not that it means much but we have had CFL's fail in under a year in the same setting.

I'm not sure why but my power bill went down substantially when I switched a handful of the most used lights in our home from CFL to LED. In the range of $20 Canadian a month. Maybe it takes a lot of power to ignite the CFL? Not only that but I have yet to have any failures of the LED bulbs whereas we were replacing CFLs often. I did this approximately 3 years ago and have been happy so far.

Poorly understood simple components in CF and LED's can result in device failure after only a small fraction of their design life. Electrolytic capacitors are often used and these fail early due to temperature (life is reduced by a factor of 2 for each 10degC rise). Hot bulbs kill capacitors and the bulb engineers/manufacturers often pay little attention to these simple passive components resulting in early failures that could have been prevented by different capacitor selection.

I have been using cfls for almost 20 yrs. My experience is that they are much more sensitive to heat than incandescent bulbs. If you put them in confined enclosures designed for incandescent bulbs they are prone to fail quickly. CFLs perform very well if you make sure they get adequate ventilation.
No experience with LED lighting yet. Way too expensive compared to well ventilated CFLs.

@Diachi "...most home lighting situations don't need 100w equivalency." That is a matter of opinion. I would have to differ there. I cannot stand anything less than 75Weq. 100Weq is my target. With 1600+ Lumens I can see details and do not need glasses. With anything less than 75Weq I cannot see small details and my peripheral vision does not work at all glasses or not. Unless you put three or more 40Weq bulbs for every 100Weq, which negates all the savings, it would be analogous to torture for me. It would be Just enough light that my dark vision doesn’t kick in and not enough to keep from bashing my shins into everything in the house. I agree LED replacement bulbs still are not affordable enough to use in every fixture. They do have a use when mixed. I have several dimmable fixtures that could really use them as CFL bulbs will not even light at full power. As others have noted the CFL’s are sensitive to on/off cycles due to the plasma arc eating the internal leads. Mythbusters had a show on “Is it cheaper to leave the light on for a few minutes or turn them off?” One of the tests they ran was on/off cycles as the electric costs didn’t justify it. They set it up to switch on and off every five seconds. The lights failed in this order; CFL, industrial FL Tube, incandescent, and the LED had yet to fail after a month. So if you have a light that does on and off regularly an LED could save considerably over any of the other choices.