Driverless LED?????

[Kev]

What does that mean John? They fail lol?

[amtrakuk]

A lot of these have a control chip which switches the leds in different series/parallel combinations on the fly as the (rectified but not smoothed) mains waveform goes up and down. Clever? Well yes, unless you object to the annoying 100Hz flicker and the fact they regularly pop on mains transients!

I saw, I think "bigclive" on YouTube rip one down and demonstrate the high frequency flicker, 100 Hz hardly noticeable by the eye but I suspect overdrives the LED which leads to early failure or rapid aging of the LED chip (reduced output). You reduce the driver demands but passes the stress onto other components IMHO.