Throw - Incan vs LED ?

[PayBack]

It is my understanding that with rain and fog, the color temperature of the beam is the biggest factor. Automotive FOG lights are usually amber in color, for a reason. The cool white-to-blue color of most LEDs suffer outdoors, especially in rain/fog.

And, IMO, due to the high CRI of an incand, you see better with less lumens vs an LED.

YMMV.

Actually I think you'll find that amber fog lights have no advantage in fog and rain (which is why most modern fog lights are now white). I considered "upgrading" my new cars foglights to amber, but the more I researched it the more I found you gained nothing.

"This explanation is flawed for more than one reason. Fog droplets are, on
average, smaller than cloud droplets, but they still are huge compared with
the wavelengths of visible light. Thus scattering of such light by fog is
essentially wavelength independent. Unfortunately, many people learn
(without caveats) Rayleigh's scattering law and then assume that it applies
to everything. They did not learn that this law is limited to scatterers
small compared with the wavelength and at wavelengths far from strong
absorption."

-Dr. Lawrence D. Woolf
General Atomics

see also http://www.gi.alaska.edu/ScienceForum/ASF5/593.html

 

[mdocod]

Hi PayBack,

Awesome info! I have edited my post just before yours to refer readers to your post and point out the incorrectness of that particular point made.

Thank you,
Eric

 

[PayBack]

Hi PayBack,

Awesome info! I have edited my post just before yours to refer readers to your post and point out the incorrectness of that particular point made.

Thank you,
Eric

Yeah I did a bit of research a while back due to being so old I remember cars with amber fog lights and wondered if my white ones were less effective. I started googling to see if it was worth finding amber bulbs and while most laymen said yes, the guys with lots of letters next to their names said no, so I didn't bother lol.

 

[NE450No2]

Both have their advantages. The LED's mainly in longer battery life and Lamp life...

However the color rendition and depth percetion of the incandescent is far superior to the LED.

When tracking a blood trail, and or looking for an animal in the woods, the incandescent is FAR superior.

Also, when I go out at night to check on my animals, an Incandescent light is FAR better at allowing me to find them.

 

[PinarelloOnly]

I have a water treatment tank in my basement (white spun fiberglass)
every now and then I have to check the level of the calcite or resin in the
tank, to do that I hold an incan light on the other side (E2E) which lights up
the inside of the tank allowing me to see where the level is.

I have held a 280 lumen LED up to that tank and you cannot see anything,
it will not light up the inside of that tank at all. I am surprised at some of the
answers from you guys on here. Color rendition has very little to do with
throw it has more to do with ions and atoms. All of us have held a 60-80
lumen incan up to our hands and felt the heat from it. The same ions and
atoms that produce throw from an incan also give you a tan in a tanning bed,
that is why there are no LED tanning beds.

 

[Popsiclestix]

I have a water treatment tank in my basement (white spun fiberglass)
every now and then I have to check the level of the calcite or resin in the
tank, to do that I hold an incan light on the other side (E2E) which lights up
the inside of the tank allowing me to see where the level is.

I have held a 280 lumen LED up to that tank and you cannot see anything,
it will not light up the inside of that tank at all. I am surprised at some of the
answers from you guys on here. Color rendition has very little to do with
throw it has more to do with ions and atoms.

More likely is that fiberglass reflects blue light better than yellow light. Thus if you shine an LED with high blue spectral content at the tank, it will reflect most of that blue back at you, making the tank more opaque to your eyes.

All of us have held a 60-80
lumen incan up to our hands and felt the heat from it. The same ions and
atoms that produce throw from an incan also give you a tan in a tanning bed,
that is why there are no LED tanning beds.

Light is made up of neither atoms nor ions. Light is made up of photons, which are packets of energy.

Furthermore, a quick search of Google reveals that there are LED tanning beds in existence. The reasons why LEDs are not a common tanning bed light solution is because of the raw power involved, the high upfront costs, and the economics of mass producing UV LEDs for one particular application.

 

[TorchBoy]

In addition to what Popsiclestix said, incandescent bulbs produce very little UV light, so it doesn't make much sense to use them for tanning beds. Heat lamps, on the other hand, sure - they produce lots of heat. You'd roast the person you were trying to tan. UV fluorescent tubes are normally used for tanning beds.

 

[Chauncey Gardner]

If an incan really does radiate in an isotropic spherical pattern, then a simple ratio of the hole area vs total reflector surface area would be bounding. The hole area doesn't look like 15% of the total area to me.

The larger point is that BigChelis's IS measurements have not shown any effect of a larger reflector hole size on lumens loss.

No expert, but it seems to me from looking at incan vs led beams the incan "hole" comes at the expense of lux given the nature of the missing light from the larger reflector hole.

The superior tint & cri seem to help make up some of this difference in the throwers because (at least to my eye) the resolution is relatively better than a comparable (but somewhat more efficient) led light.

Particularly outside in a natural setting where the textures & colors tend to pop more and give you a better feel for what you are seeing as it relates to depth perception.



Can't wait until they start focusing a new generation of high cri, throwy LED's.
The latest stuff in the mini Quarks gives hope to the idea they can do the same thing for the masses in a naturally throwy light, with great color rendition, designed from the emitter up.


Just my .02.

 

[PayBack]

The same ions and
atoms that produce throw from an incan

Here I was wasting my time with LED's when I could have been buying my own particle accellerators