Recently I dumpster dived a broken Philips GU10 4 W LED spotlight and obviously took it apart. What I found inside surprised me a bit from an A-brand like Philips.
It's this one that was introduced ca. late 2012.
Since I was likely going to break it permanently during the teardown, I turned it on first instead. The reasons why this was discarded was erratic behaviour of the light, and when lit it seemed too dull for the wattage (supposedly a 35 W halogen replacement). Probable cause: defective LED.
This is what's behind the lens:
200 V it says? Yep, when it lights, there's about 180 V across the two leads. There must be some shorted LEDs under that yellow goo and some others are intermittently dropping out completely.
The aluminium insert is not exposed on the outside, it's an all-plastic encasing.
Unscrew the top and you get to see one side of the driver-pcb:
What does "quasi-dc" mean?
But the most interesting find is a capacitive dropper:
Who'd have thought that in a Philips?
Some Big Clive style reverse engineering yields this schematic of the thing:
Some calculus with the values of C2 and C3 leads to a theoretical current of 28.6 mA, and sure enough, the specs printed on the side say "29 mA".
But some things seem underrated: C2 and C3 are rated 250 V, but I don't know if that's DC (too low) or AC (acceptable). Also, when the LED-chip drops out, the voltage across the electrolytic (C1) rises to more than 300 VDC, or more than 50 V over its rating.
The "driver" seems in good shape, the intermittent nature of the light is caused by the LED-chip. After some hours in the freezer, the problem became quite a bit more pronounced.
Let's conclude with the remark that I had expected better from a high priced Philips (and no, I have no reason to believe that this would be a counterfeit).