Whether you’re designing LED lights or using them, a handheld spectrometer is as essential to your trade as a pocket knife is to a boy/girl scout on a campout. I’ll share my thoughts on the three units I’ve had the good fortune to play with personally during my various adventures in the realm of lighting.
In case you aren’t familiar with the term “spectrometer” (a.k.a. spectral illuminance radiometer), don’t worry. It’s a fancy name for a device used to analyze a light source and determine its spectral components. In our professions, we’re most concerned with so-called visible light, but we often also need to know about what’s going on in the adjacent infrared and UV bands. The handheld units we’ll discuss here can quantify a lamp’s spectral attributes and present them as a numerical representation, a graphic illustration and a data file.
They are used in quality assurance at lighting goods point of manufacture – and in design compliance verification – they’re used by lighting auditors, lighting designers, municipal code enforcement folks- they get used by the myriad of manufacturers QC mavens. Museums and high end boutiques often use them to confirm things like whether their fancy new 7000 K lamps are really 7000K or that their lighting system is really delivering the high CRI numbers they paid for.
But, whatever your application, a spectrometer is a great way to cut through the inaccurate information, inflated claims, and outright snake oil that’s so prevalent in the LED industry these days. The cold, hard data these little wonders put in your hand is invaluable for extracting the truth an installer’s or manufacturers’ claims. With that out of the way, here are my impressions of the units I’ve held in my hands/used/played with in the last 18 months:
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In case you aren’t familiar with the term “spectrometer” (a.k.a. spectral illuminance radiometer), don’t worry. It’s a fancy name for a device used to analyze a light source and determine its spectral components. In our professions, we’re most concerned with so-called visible light, but we often also need to know about what’s going on in the adjacent infrared and UV bands. The handheld units we’ll discuss here can quantify a lamp’s spectral attributes and present them as a numerical representation, a graphic illustration and a data file.
They are used in quality assurance at lighting goods point of manufacture – and in design compliance verification – they’re used by lighting auditors, lighting designers, municipal code enforcement folks- they get used by the myriad of manufacturers QC mavens. Museums and high end boutiques often use them to confirm things like whether their fancy new 7000 K lamps are really 7000K or that their lighting system is really delivering the high CRI numbers they paid for.
But, whatever your application, a spectrometer is a great way to cut through the inaccurate information, inflated claims, and outright snake oil that’s so prevalent in the LED industry these days. The cold, hard data these little wonders put in your hand is invaluable for extracting the truth an installer’s or manufacturers’ claims. With that out of the way, here are my impressions of the units I’ve held in my hands/used/played with in the last 18 months:
Read More
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