'Daylight' LED lights

[R D S]

Does daylight mean blue, or are these lights not right? I didn't want warm ones as they look beige. Problem is I got 10 of them on ebay, as they were a good price.

Anyway, i've put one up in my office at work and I feel like i'm, in a fishtank, I know things aren't nearly right as after a couple of hours up there I went downstairs where we have some orange clipboards and they appeared to be glowing.

I wonder if they can they be toned down at all? I need more than one light so if I fitted a warm one adjacent, would I get something more natural overall? It probably doesn't help that the room is painted lilac, that's going to change, I wonder if I could improve matters with a different colour decor.

[whisky-dave]

Well that explains it.

Recreating daylight isn't easy from LED's especailly at a good price.

Probabily although that won;t change the spectrum of cheap LED's or even expensive ones.

[Max Demian]

What was the specified colour temperature? (6000 K is like sunlight.) Note that they can't simulate sunlight exactly as that requires a more or less continuous spectrum through the visible range. LEDs tend to have a lumpy spectrum that lacks the violet.

[R D S]

The specified temp was 6000-6500k. I should have bought just the one for testing, but they were almost half price bought in a pack of 10, I wondered how much it would matter but they are bloody awful.

I have a panel in the kitchen at home which switches between 3 temperatures. One end is yellow, the other looks like an operating theatre but the inbetween one is great.

[John Rumm]

That does not always bode well :-)

White LEDs are a hybrid of a blue LED, plus a florescent coating to turn that into white light.

Poor quality phosphors tend to emit a fairly "spikey" white with lots of spectral gaps, and a fair amount of the LED's blue bleeding though.

Good quality daylight can look fine - so long as its bright enough. The eye is attuned to daylight "colour" light at high intensities - making it feel bright and sunny. At lower levels it just feels cold and blue.

[The Natural Philosopher]

That is very 'daylight'

Warm is 3500-4500. I like it somewhere in the 5000 range for work

[PeterC]

The shouldn't be blue - I've quite a few 6000 - 6500K and sometimes forget to switch one of in daylight because it makes no difference to the perceived colour.

[Bill Wright]

No. Chuck 'em int' dustbin. They're neither use nor ornament. Blue lights put cobs on me.

Bill

[Martin Brown]

You could probably find a pale orange glass paint to tone them down a bit. Basically 6000K looks blue when compared to ordinary incandescents.

I prefer warm myself as it mimics conventional incandescent bulbs.

[alan_m]

Why don't you try one in a room that has mainly a white wall/ceiling to see if your paint job causing the main problem?

Some so called daylight have a large blue output while the better ones still have this output but balance this with a similar output throughout the rest of the spectrum (but skewed towards blue).

.

[Brian Gaff (Sofa)]

Well to me blue is not daylight. You can get cold white which are most definitely blue. I know this as although I have no sight, shine one of those blue white leds in a room and my visual disturbances get to epic proportions and look like lightening with vivid blue flickering.

Yuck. Brian

[Brian Gaff (Sofa)]

Some of those which use uv leds that flouress a phosphor are apparently pretty close but not as efficient of course. Brian

[Brian Gaff (Sofa)]

You may actually find one in the ones you have that is less blue. Apparently these cheap ones can be very variable. I agree some glass stain paint as used by theatrical folk to colour things could be an answer but it would probably be less efficient and might look a bit streaky! Brian

[ARW]

What lamps/fittings are they?

[ARW]

I would consider anything above 4000k to be cool white and 6000k for daylight.

[tabbypurr]

No surprise there. Daylight looks great at daylight light levels, but horrid at indoor lighting levels.

What can you do about it? Relegate the things to cupboards, garage etc. Or sell them to some dodgy geezer in the pub for growing parsley. If you must use them for some odd reason, try a yellow, orange or pink reflector or shade. You will of course lose some light output. Adding a warm white bulb would also help a fair bit.

If you're determined to experiment, you might find that mounting other lighting LEDs on top of the ones in the bulb produces a second stage of fluorescence, converting some of the excess blue into red/yellow/green & thus improving the light colour.

NT

[alan_m]

It's down to personal preference. I find that I prefer cool white/daylight and warm white looks dull and very artificial.

Possibly as I'm getting older the higher contrast cool white seems to give suits my eyesight. I find it easier to work and read with cool/daylight LED lighting.

[whisky-dave]

That could be because the daylight bilb isn't bright enough to matter and it;s contributing little to the ambient light level.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

The 'colour' of daylight varies by time of day, time of year, and where in the world you measure it.

And pretty well no artificial light gives you the entire spectrum of colours that daylight consists of. And the cheaper they are, generally the worse at doing this.

[tabbypurr]

Sell them to this guy. Very few people like daylight bulbs. They're sometimes used for artwork.

NT