I took down the two tacky fake oil lamps on either side of our kitchen window yesterday (they didn't really throw a lot of light anyway), and replaced them with overhead track lights throwing lots of good light down on the countertop where I need it. As it happens, the two CFL bulbs I re-used from the old lamps were 3500K "bright white" bulbs, while the four new ones I installed were the default "soft white", simply because they're still a lot cheaper.
The difference is really very visible. You look up at the lights, and the two 3500K bulbs are white, and the other four are ... sort of dingy yellow.
So here's the thing. Now that we're finally moving away from incandescent bulbs, we don't have to settle for "soft white" any more. It does not cost significantly more to line a CFL bulb with a 3500K phosphor than a 2700K phosphor.
So why is it that 95% of the CFL bulbs on the shelf are still that "soft white" crap, and the few 3500K bulbs cost five to eight times as much? It's not "soft", it's DIM. Nothing looks clean under that light. Things look grubby and stained even when they're not. Why should we have to continue to live with the visual limitations of an obsolescent lighting technology?
So anyway, the next time I'm by the hardware store, hang the extra $6 per bulb, I'm picking up four more 23W 3500K bulbs. I have to work under that light, and I'm going to have it bright and white, dammit, because I want to be able to see properly what I'm doing. It's the same reason I have 32W 5000K T8 tubes¹ in the shoplight over my workbench, and a 30W 5000K CFL hanging directly over my desk.
We don't have to settle for the poor visual quality of "soft white" dingy yellow any more, and I'm not going to.
[1] T8 tubes are smaller diameter and more efficient than the old T12 fluorescent tubes. A 48-inch, 5000K, 32W RE80 T8 lamp has a lamp efficacy of 92 lumens per watt, and a color rendering index of 86. By comparison, a typical 48-inch "cool white" (4200K) 34W T12 lamp has a lamp efficacy of 78 lm/W and a CRI of 60; a "warm white" lamp has a marginally higher efficacy of 79.4 lm/W, but a CRI of only 53. A 5000K 40W "full spectrum" T12 musters a CRI of 90, but manages only about 61 lm/W; a 5600K T12 pushes the CRI to 92, but at a relatively dismal 55 lm/W. (Theoretically, even an incandescent bulb can achieve 52 lm/W, but that's at the melting point of the tungsten filament. 35 lm/W is a more realistic figure.) The newer T5 tubes are even more efficient; a 35W RE80 46" T5 tube can muster as high as 104 lm/W with a CRI of 85. (T5 lamps can even be dimmable.)