Advice required re LED's.
I currently use a lowvoltage 50 watt lamp at my bench (jeweller), it's good light, a bit yellow and expensive to replace.
I have high hopes for LED's but before I change things around, I thought it best to see if anyone has had real experience of them.
I find led light tiring. I would use halogen lighting as its colour is like daylight.
mrcheerful
This is useful information.
I learn I need as full a spectrum as possible, tired eyes I do not want.
Perhaps I should ask in uk.eyes ng. (?)
LEDs are basically probably not a candidate. You're likely to be looking at some $200 plus for a light of a similar wattage. I'd look at fluorescant lights, there are a wide variety of colour temperatures available. And if you want, you can customise the colour temperature a bit - add some blue card to the reflector, or yellow, ...
You want a high frequency ballast - flicker is bad.
You don't get full spectrum with white LEDs. They are basically blue LEDs with a fluorescent material to produce the white light. There are lots of holes in the output spectrum.
Also it is unlikely you will get sufficient brightness. You'd need a shed load of LEDs to rival the brightness of a 50W halogen.
I'd stick with your halogen lamp. You can get LV bulbs with built in dichroic filters if you are concerned about the colour.
There exist 'warm white' LEDs, which don't do this.
Thank you, I'm converted back again.
Try a Luxo illuminated magnifier. There's a lot around cheap at present, they have a "daylight" circular fluorescent in them, and there's a flap over the top to cover the magnifier and make them into a simple worklight. Nice long-reach arms too.
I also like the quartz-halogen bulbs that fit into a standard bayonet lampholder - around 150W (sorry, can't rememeber the name). Too big for a desk lamp, but they're a nice workroom light and the colour is pretty good.
really, what manufacturer?
I thought that LEDs by their nature only produce a narrow spectrum of light.
It's just that some come with a fluorescant material with a wider spectrum. Luxeon "Warm White" LEDs. LEDs and fluorescants are basically similar - one uses blue, the other uses UV to excite a mix of phosphor. It's just that with the LED, the basic colour can be used as part of the light, if desired.
Right, I have seen the luxeon ones. The light quality is still not that great, I wouldn't want to use one as a work light as the OP wanted (even if you could get enough to make it bright enough). The colour temperature is quite variable from device to device, and also within the beam of each LED.
I have no doubt that LEDs will get there for this application but they aren't there yet.
The "warm white" variant? It's distinctly different, and really does look "warm white". The normal one is slightly more efficient, and is more variable.
I've seen them, and the emission spectrum. I found them to approximate tungsten lighting in appearance (though possibly a bit more pink). The spectrum is similar to that of a normal white LED: a narrow peak in the blue and a broad fluorescence peak centred in the yellow but with a fair bit of green and orange-red. In the warm white this doesn't simply tail off but goes up again a bit in the red before tailing off still sithin the visible. Colour rendering (empirical, not technical use of the term) is good, though less so at the shortwave end. The normal luxeons aren't bad either.
The OP might be better off with an RGB array of LEDs (which is also more efficient) as you can balance the colours, but that would be DIY(!) and/or expensive.
They're nice. But not very daylight compared to either daylight or a daylight tungsten.
I use a 100W mains halogen. Quite good, colour wise. Although so should a suitable LV one be. Has a life of about the same as most bulbs - 1000 hours - if not knocked.
Present LEDs are not continuous spectrum light which I'd think might matter for your work.
I have R/G/B 38W fluorescant lights, that I still mean to make into a variable colour lighting fixture.
These IMHO don't give the same illumination as a 50 watt LV halogen, and aren't decent tubes, colour wise.
My choice. Early ones didn't seem to last, but seem to have got better.
Try 2, 3 or 4 20W desktop halogens, cheap as chips! :
cheers, Pete.
You get orrible coloured shadows if you do this (with any discrete sources of R G and B), unless you are a long way from the object being lit. It is also pretty much impossible to get any decent sort of white. (I've designed several colour mixing fixtures for people, both fluorescent and LED, and all suffer from this problem).
There is no reason that they have to be. It's just that the needed diffusing optics are bulky, and a bit annoying to design.
As to being impossible to get a decent white, I suspect you may be right - only three phosphors doesn't help, or the relative low power of the red tube.
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