> I would not recommend anything as high colour temp as that for
> > domestic use. 4500K is going to look terrible, and 4700K a shade > > worse.
> Depends whether you want to retain the accuracy of the colours on your
> monitor - although this depends on what colour temperature it's designed
> or set up for.
Tubes like that look terrible under all conditions. Cool white is the tube that gave fluorescents such a bad name, and 4500K is quite similar to cool white, being nearly as nasty. The only exception I've found is with extremely low powers, like 2w, which give an icy moonlit nightlighting effect.
3500K shouldnt distort the eye's view of 6000K monitor colours - but setting a monitor to 9000K is both colour distortion and not very pleasant to work with. I've never really understood why its a popular setting. Things look so much better at more sensible colour temps.
Well, since there are tubes that mimic daylight, perhaps you're actually Dracula? ;-)
Genuine daylight tubes are excellent for work environments, IMHO, or where colour rendering is important. But don't confuse them with the nasty 'white' things supplied with a cheap fitting. Of course, domestically, you'll often need a better match to tungsten for pleasant night time lighting, but that's a different ball game.
A lesson in colour temperatures might be handy here... Your eyes and brain were designed to work with natural sunlight. Sunlight has a very wide range of colour temperatures and intensities. The midday summer sun can be 6000-8000K and very bright. Conversely, sunset can be less than 2500K and very dark compared to midday summer sun. However you can still see colours fine in both these environments as your eyes and brain are evolved to work over that range.
Now what screws things up is if the colour temperature is way out of range for the light level (lumens). Artificial lighting levels people use in their houses are actually not a lot brighter than sunset, so the colour temperature most appropriate is around that of a filament lamp at 2700K. (You might argue that given a filament lamp is 2700K, people have chosen lighting levels so that looks 'right'.) This is also the colour temperature of most compact fluorescent retrofits so they match filament lamps and your expectations of colour temperature of artificial lighting.
For lighting during the daytime, you will expect higher light level, e.g. in an office. To match a higher light level, you would also expect a higher colour temperature. This is why offices normally use
3500K colour temperature lamps. If you intend to light a room in your house particularly brightly (maybe the kitchen or a workshop where you do intricate work), you might prefer 3500K lighting there, but it will seem a bit strange initially when you walk in to it in the evening, although you will adjust to the higher lighting level and colour temperature in a matter of seconds.
Now the very high colour temperature lamps (~5000K and up) will look perfectly OK if you fit enough of them that you get up to midday summer sun lighting levels. That probably means completely covering the ceiling with the fittings. Remember what happens if you take a sheet of white paper out into the summer sun -- you have to squint to read it the light level is so bright, and even after time to adjust to the lighting level, it won't be comfortable reading it. Now you will have to get your artificial lighting up to that same uncomfortable level before these very high colour temperature lamps will feel right. Why you would want to do this I can't imagine.
Another area confused with colour temperature is the nature of the spectrum a lamp emits -- continuous at one extreme and a few discrete lines at the other. This is completely unrelated to colour temperature, but unfortunately the lighting industry marketing people confuse the issue for using terms which imply a continuous spectrum when they really mean high colour temperature. The two properties are not related. Descrete line sources, or sources which are continuous but are not even or have some holes/peaks in the range can cause colours to be washed out, simply because they happen to be missing some of the components a particular pigment responds to, of have an over- abundance in some part of the spectrum. Generally your eyes are quite forgiving of descrete line light sources, providing there are enough lines covering the visible spectum and they are not too badly matched. TV cameras and anything else which splits an image up into colour components and reassembles it at the other end can be a lot less forgiving though.
You've put it far better than I ever could, Andrew, - thanks. Continuous even spectrum lighting is essential if you need to match colours - or indeed even expect them to look 'right'. And with low level lighting as you might want while using a monitor or viewing TV, it's equally as important if you wish to see the colours as intended. Of course, with TV, a vast proportion of the public don't care - the brighter and more 'primary' the colours on their screen the happier they are - regardless.
Hang on, the colours on a monitor screen are produced by the monitor and dont depend on the ambient lighting. The eye's perception of them depends to a limited extent on ambient lighting, but not by much. It depends mainly just on the monitor, as the brain concentrates on this. Hence one can use different colour temp ambient lighting without having much effect on how the monitor is perceived.
Secondly the monitor brightness level is far removed from daylight, thus proper perception of the monitor colour will occur if the monitor uses a lower colour temp than daylight. Ie 9000K is well off for correct perception. Even 6000K is much too high.
Then there's the question of preference... I prefer a low colour temp display, I find it much more comfortable to work with, and the colours overall appear richer and warmer. And why not.
And thanks to Andrew Gabriel for a good piece there.
Did you see Rory Bremner's "I'm a calamity, get me out of here"? The one where he's doing Conservative leaders in the jungle and he had Michael Howard sleeping during the day hanging upside down from a tree cocooned in a sleeping bag. Very funny.
I'm afraid they do. If you use dimmed tungsten as a background, the brain adjusts to that. Might not be the case if your screen was so big as to be your full field of view, but this isn't of much use for a computer monitor.
It's been known from the early days of colour TV that the control rooms where the cameras are adjusted must have the background lighting of the same colour temperature as the monitors. Of course, for just watching TV at home, you can have what suits you, but I'm talking about ideal viewing conditions here - as might well apply at home if you're doing graphics work on your computer.
The colour temperature of daylight doesn't necessarily change with brightness - that daylight might well find its way into a room via a white reflective area - say a wall. In the middle of a field, it will, because as the day changes both the level and colour temperature change, but you don't use a monitor in a field.
I'm not knocking individual preferences - just saying how it should be done if you wish pro results on graphics, etc.
Maybe I've misunderstood what you're trying to say here but, but the daylight reflected off a *white* wall will have the same colour temperature as the actual daylight.
Yup. But others have said that the perceived colour temperature varies with brightness. Personally, I'm not so sure. We know that as it gets dark, the colour temperature drops along with the brightness - although this is far more marked on a sunny day.
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