"at 3 feet this can produces 10,530 lux, at 15 feet this can produces 864 lux."
That's STILL nothing compared to a traditional PAR64. They're also mixing metric and imperial units, but- pretend 15 feet is about 5 meters. 864 lux * 5m *5m = 21600 candela A PAR64 MFL is about 125,000 candela. Still an order of magnitude brighter...
Now, I'm not going to say that my $60 par64 can is BETTER than that $600 LED can, but in brightness it's tough to beat. Obviously the LED's win out on MANY other things- efficiency, power consumption, heat, ability to do color mixing built in, lamp life, etc etc...
As for the high lumen fixture, I don't have lumen data for my favorite PAR can.. but the online conversion utility said it's somewhere around 7,000 lumens. I could be wrong, the beam angle of a traditional PAR is a bit tricky to put into a simple conversion utility.. Anyway, the really expensive stuff is getting closer, but it's still not there. Of course, that 1800 lumen monster might be able to punch out saturated colors a lot better than the incandescent PAR, since you lose something like 90% of the output if you put a primary color filter on..
Did you happen to contact Rosco about their paint lines? Considering that Rosco makes color filters for lighting, I bet they're more apt to have technical data about absorption for their paints. If you tell them you're experimenting with how different paints react to LED light, they might even get excited, since LED's are becoming more popular for theatrical applications.
They don't have as much information about their paints online as the place you linked, but I'm sure you'd at least be able to talk to somebody there who knows about absorption spectra.
"Conventional gel's can't produce that stunning color." Of course they can! Easily!
Maybe you aren't buying the right gels.. And that pack of LED fixtures you linked is VERY dim compared to, say, a standard theatrical lighting fixture. If you look at the chart, it's rated at 66 lux at 5M.. whereas, say, an ETC source4 26 degree is rated at 7050 lux at the same distance. A PAR64 MFL would be about 5000 at that distance.
Granted, that's comparing unfiltered conventionals to the LED's attempting to mix white, but we're talking about two orders of magnitude difference.
I didn't see a picture of the yellow LED pointed at yellow paint, but I'd wager money that you would end up with yellow, not black. Yellow pigment reflects wavelengths in the red and green parts of the spectrum. You'd have to make some sort of crazy dichroic to only reflect back a specific band of yellow, and I don't think that's what this guy was talking about.
Basically, I don't think it's just a typo. I think he's got a basic understanding of color mixing, but he's trying to explain beyond what he really knows.. hence mistakes like mixing up light vs. pigment, or saying that yellow pigment looks black under yellow light.
Yes, I looked at the pictures, and as far as I could tell they outright contradicted some of the things he was saying. He claimed that the mixed yellow light of the LED's (a red LED with a Green LED) would make yellow pigment turn black, but if you look at the yellow illuminated image you can see that's not the case..
A lot of the stuff this fellow was saying about color mixing and perception just seemed a bit off. The electronics are cool, but I'd look elsewhere for an explanation of the optics involved.
For artistic photography, unless there's some major reason why you need the narrow band of light created by LED's, you're going to be better off using regular old gels to change the colors of your lights. To get enough intensity with LED's to match a studio strobe, you'd spend a small fortune. Gels cost $5 for a 21"x24" sheet, and there are literally thousands of colors to choose from, and you can use them with any photographic light source.
See, that reads more to me as "LED Art" than what the author of the article was trying to do. Basically, the article was just explaining how to build your own version of a readily available type of luminaire. The only thing he seems to think is innovative about his is the inclusion of high-power UV LED's. Well, that's cool, and I hope ColorKinetics (or some other manufacturer of LED lighting) picks up on that idea if they haven't already.. but there's really nothing particularly artistic about the project. It's still cool, though.
I haven't read the whole article, but anything having to do with LED technology is interesting to me. It's interesting, though, that the author doesn't seem to understand color mixing in pigment vs. light.
He says- "You mix red paint and green light, you get what appears to be yellow light."
That's not true. If you mix red LIGHT and green light, you get what looks like yellow light. If you shine green light on red paint you get a ugly dark mess. The red paint doesn't reflect the green light very well- the reason it's red is because it reflects the red portion of the spectrum. So, when you light it with green, the light that's reflected off the red is not going to be very intense, it certainly won't be yellow.
Also important is the fact that green is a primary color in light, while yellow is a primary color in pigment. If you shine green light on yellow paint, you'll actually reflect a lot of green, and if you shine yellow light on green paint it'll also (you guessed it) reflect lots of green.
I think it's interesting that he's finding out how the horrible color rendition capabilities of LED's can be used to one's advantage, but I don't know if he really understands all the theory involved...
The article implied that each metal reacted to the laser etching in a different way, and that it would take a while to come up with a color cookbook of sorts for each metal. I assume it has something to do with the sizes of the molecules involved..
In any case, that could be one reason to use a precious metal rather than something cheap, if gold is capable of being colorized in ways that lead is not...
Especially if they're talking about using it on a relatively soft metal (like gold) for an object that'd be subjected to a lot of elements and wear (like a ring or other piece of jewelry)
If you have to clear coat it in order to protect it from wear, then I see little advantage over conventional methods. Sure, paint will fade from sunlight after some years, but my experience is that engine components fade faster.. And beyond that, I'd think any of the things that can cause problems for paint (chipping, scratching, etc) would be just as likely to cause problems for the modified metal.
Of course, this is all purely hypothetical, and I certainly think this is VERY COOL technology. I wonder if something like this might end up taking the place of dichroic glass in some situations, or perhaps make the manufacture of dichroics cheaper and available on more materials..
I have to wonder how difficult it would be to rub off the outer layer of the metal that's causing the wavelength modifications.. The article implies that the laser is modifying the metal at an atomic level, and I can't imagine it'd be too tough to scrape a few atoms off the surface of an aluminum body panel. What happens when a bird poops on the hood of your laser-colored car? Or worse, when some road tar gets splattered onto your front bumper. Normally, cleaning these up involves solvents and scrubbing, and I don't imagine that bare metal would withstand that combination all that well over time.
..to be able to transplant a new immune system into a patient with, say, some immune deficiency virus.. and potentially be able to add years to their life.
Maybe you wouldn't need to bother with the anti-rejection drugs since the immune system of the patient would already be suppressed by the virus.
I know it probably can't work that way, but I imagine that any major breakthroughs in the study of the human immune system will have relevance in AIDS/HIV research.
Music CD's already include error correction bytes embedded in each frame of data, so I assume this technology does the same sort of thing for data CD's/DVD's/bluray's/etc..
On music CD's, there's one error correction byte for every three bytes of data. That's a lot more space-efficient than just burning your data twice.....
Why are people so up in arms about a $500 price tag?
You are getting an iPod, which is worth a couple hundred bucks on its own.. and a phone, which is worth a bit too. Seems like a perfectly reasonable price to pay, especially when compared to how much your average cell phone service plan costs. I've got a cheap plan, but when I signed a 2 year agreement I was essentially promising to pay verizon $1200. I'm sure the amount people will end up paying to enable all the fancy features of the iPhone will be much higher...
So if you're going to pay that much for the service anyway, might as well have a kickass phone.
Actually, in theatre the incandescent color temperature (around 2800K) is usually considered more pleasing.
As for what really makes incandescents better than fluorescents to look at- it's the color rendition. Incandescents have a much more uniform spectrum of light than fluorescents, so generally all the colors of the rainbow look better under incandescent light. Fluorescents are getting better, but they're always trying to catch up to what an incandescent can do.
This is why you can't just tint a fluorescent tube pink to get rid of the greenish cast, and expect to get the same results as using an incandescent. You still are getting a spike-filled spectrum of light, only pinker.
Fluorescents aren't particularly dimmable, and are really only good for flood light purposes. I do lighting design for a living, and the only option available for the work I do (Aside from very expensive HID fixtures, and even more expensive LED's...) is to use incandescent lamps.
There are fluorescent lamps that dim, but they have much more expensive ballasts and dimming systems, and once again, can only really be used for floodlights. Also, as far as I know, fluorescents can only dim down to maybe 25% intensity, at which point they simply turn off. No good for what I do, but at least it might allow one to get that romantic mood in their dining room...
I don't know how broad the scope of this legislation is in Australia, but I know that when I looked at replacing the 18 work lights in my theatre with fluorescents, the cost was going to be roughly $2000. Currently the cost to replace all the lights is about $100, and they're rated for 5000 hours vs. maybe 20,000 for the CFL's. I suppose the other $1600 would hopefully be made up in energy savings, but I'm skeptical.
When I was a DJ for wedding receptions and the like, all my music came from sources that *supposedly* included the cost of performance rights with the cost of their CD's. I was working through an agency, and they sent us out with a monster collection (I usually had the smaller, 24 CD version) that contained often requested songs in a nice cataloged format. I also bought new releases through a company called "Promo Only" that would only sell their stuff to working DJ's who could provide documentation that they were, in fact, playing before audiences several times a week every week.
I suppose now if a DJ wants to show people how to do the dance that commonly associated with the "Electric Boogie" they'll have to pay additional royalties...
Back in my Carnegie Mellon days, any old hardware that had outlived its usefulness would get put out in the hallways for students to pilfer. "Hallway Rule" they called it.. It was well known enough that in the instances where things had to be stored in the hallway that were NOT meant to be given away, professors would put numerous signs saying "NOT TRASH- DO NOT REMOVE" on them.
So, the moral is, Google simply needs to find a sufficient hallway.
Slashdot Mirror
"at 3 feet this can produces 10,530 lux, at 15 feet this can produces 864 lux."
That's STILL nothing compared to a traditional PAR64.
They're also mixing metric and imperial units, but- pretend 15 feet is about 5 meters.
864 lux * 5m *5m = 21600 candela
A PAR64 MFL is about 125,000 candela. Still an order of magnitude brighter...
Now, I'm not going to say that my $60 par64 can is BETTER than that $600 LED can, but in brightness it's tough to beat. Obviously the LED's win out on MANY other things- efficiency, power consumption, heat, ability to do color mixing built in, lamp life, etc etc...
As for the high lumen fixture, I don't have lumen data for my favorite PAR can.. but the online conversion utility said it's somewhere around 7,000 lumens. I could be wrong, the beam angle of a traditional PAR is a bit tricky to put into a simple conversion utility.. Anyway, the really expensive stuff is getting closer, but it's still not there. Of course, that 1800 lumen monster might be able to punch out saturated colors a lot better than the incandescent PAR, since you lose something like 90% of the output if you put a primary color filter on..
Did you happen to contact Rosco about their paint lines? Considering that Rosco makes color filters for lighting, I bet they're more apt to have technical data about absorption for their paints. If you tell them you're experimenting with how different paints react to LED light, they might even get excited, since LED's are becoming more popular for theatrical applications.
http://www.rosco.com/us/index.asp
They don't have as much information about their paints online as the place you linked, but I'm sure you'd at least be able to talk to somebody there who knows about absorption spectra.
Well, it makes sense- green in pigment is usually a mix of yellow and blue pigments.
What kinds of pigments are you using? Are we talking about acrylic paint from the art store, or something more lighting-specific?
I think it's highly unlikely that you'll find too many "true" reflectors of yellow without getting into dichroics..
But, then again, I'd love to be proven wrong. It's an interesting subject.
"Conventional gel's can't produce that stunning color."
Of course they can! Easily!
Maybe you aren't buying the right gels.. And that pack of LED fixtures you linked is VERY dim compared to, say, a standard theatrical lighting fixture. If you look at the chart, it's rated at 66 lux at 5M.. whereas, say, an ETC source4 26 degree is rated at 7050 lux at the same distance. A PAR64 MFL would be about 5000 at that distance.
Granted, that's comparing unfiltered conventionals to the LED's attempting to mix white, but we're talking about two orders of magnitude difference.
I didn't see a picture of the yellow LED pointed at yellow paint, but I'd wager money that you would end up with yellow, not black. Yellow pigment reflects wavelengths in the red and green parts of the spectrum. You'd have to make some sort of crazy dichroic to only reflect back a specific band of yellow, and I don't think that's what this guy was talking about.
Basically, I don't think it's just a typo. I think he's got a basic understanding of color mixing, but he's trying to explain beyond what he really knows.. hence mistakes like mixing up light vs. pigment, or saying that yellow pigment looks black under yellow light.
Yes, I looked at the pictures, and as far as I could tell they outright contradicted some of the things he was saying. He claimed that the mixed yellow light of the LED's (a red LED with a Green LED) would make yellow pigment turn black, but if you look at the yellow illuminated image you can see that's not the case..
A lot of the stuff this fellow was saying about color mixing and perception just seemed a bit off. The electronics are cool, but I'd look elsewhere for an explanation of the optics involved.
Oh, that sounds cool.. I can see how it would be advantageous to have something small with strong battery life, like an LED maglite or something.
Are any of your images viewable online? Flickr?
For artistic photography, unless there's some major reason why you need the narrow band of light created by LED's, you're going to be better off using regular old gels to change the colors of your lights. To get enough intensity with LED's to match a studio strobe, you'd spend a small fortune. Gels cost $5 for a 21"x24" sheet, and there are literally thousands of colors to choose from, and you can use them with any photographic light source.
See, that reads more to me as "LED Art" than what the author of the article was trying to do. Basically, the article was just explaining how to build your own version of a readily available type of luminaire. The only thing he seems to think is innovative about his is the inclusion of high-power UV LED's. Well, that's cool, and I hope ColorKinetics (or some other manufacturer of LED lighting) picks up on that idea if they haven't already.. but there's really nothing particularly artistic about the project. It's still cool, though.
I haven't read the whole article, but anything having to do with LED technology is interesting to me. It's interesting, though, that the author doesn't seem to understand color mixing in pigment vs. light.
He says-
"You mix red paint and green light, you get what appears to be yellow light."
That's not true. If you mix red LIGHT and green light, you get what looks like yellow light. If you shine green light on red paint you get a ugly dark mess. The red paint doesn't reflect the green light very well- the reason it's red is because it reflects the red portion of the spectrum. So, when you light it with green, the light that's reflected off the red is not going to be very intense, it certainly won't be yellow.
Also important is the fact that green is a primary color in light, while yellow is a primary color in pigment. If you shine green light on yellow paint, you'll actually reflect a lot of green, and if you shine yellow light on green paint it'll also (you guessed it) reflect lots of green.
I think it's interesting that he's finding out how the horrible color rendition capabilities of LED's can be used to one's advantage, but I don't know if he really understands all the theory involved...
The article implied that each metal reacted to the laser etching in a different way, and that it would take a while to come up with a color cookbook of sorts for each metal. I assume it has something to do with the sizes of the molecules involved..
In any case, that could be one reason to use a precious metal rather than something cheap, if gold is capable of being colorized in ways that lead is not...
How I wish I had a spare mod point to tag that post "funny" :)
Especially if they're talking about using it on a relatively soft metal (like gold) for an object that'd be subjected to a lot of elements and wear (like a ring or other piece of jewelry)
If you have to clear coat it in order to protect it from wear, then I see little advantage over conventional methods. Sure, paint will fade from sunlight after some years, but my experience is that engine components fade faster.. And beyond that, I'd think any of the things that can cause problems for paint (chipping, scratching, etc) would be just as likely to cause problems for the modified metal.
Of course, this is all purely hypothetical, and I certainly think this is VERY COOL technology. I wonder if something like this might end up taking the place of dichroic glass in some situations, or perhaps make the manufacture of dichroics cheaper and available on more materials..
I have to wonder how difficult it would be to rub off the outer layer of the metal that's causing the wavelength modifications.. The article implies that the laser is modifying the metal at an atomic level, and I can't imagine it'd be too tough to scrape a few atoms off the surface of an aluminum body panel. What happens when a bird poops on the hood of your laser-colored car? Or worse, when some road tar gets splattered onto your front bumper. Normally, cleaning these up involves solvents and scrubbing, and I don't imagine that bare metal would withstand that combination all that well over time.
..to be able to transplant a new immune system into a patient with, say, some immune deficiency virus.. and potentially be able to add years to their life. Maybe you wouldn't need to bother with the anti-rejection drugs since the immune system of the patient would already be suppressed by the virus. I know it probably can't work that way, but I imagine that any major breakthroughs in the study of the human immune system will have relevance in AIDS/HIV research.
Too bad we won't have analog much longer..
At least not in the US.
http://www.fcc.gov/cgb/consumerfacts/digitaltv.html
Check it out....
There are multiple robots from white box robotics that make use of Linux..
They sure aren't cheap, though.
Music CD's already include error correction bytes embedded in each frame of data, so I assume this technology does the same sort of thing for data CD's/DVD's/bluray's/etc..
On music CD's, there's one error correction byte for every three bytes of data. That's a lot more space-efficient than just burning your data twice.....
Why are people so up in arms about a $500 price tag?
You are getting an iPod, which is worth a couple hundred bucks on its own.. and a phone, which is worth a bit too. Seems like a perfectly reasonable price to pay, especially when compared to how much your average cell phone service plan costs. I've got a cheap plan, but when I signed a 2 year agreement I was essentially promising to pay verizon $1200. I'm sure the amount people will end up paying to enable all the fancy features of the iPhone will be much higher...
So if you're going to pay that much for the service anyway, might as well have a kickass phone.
Actually, in theatre the incandescent color temperature (around 2800K) is usually considered more pleasing.
As for what really makes incandescents better than fluorescents to look at- it's the color rendition. Incandescents have a much more uniform spectrum of light than fluorescents, so generally all the colors of the rainbow look better under incandescent light. Fluorescents are getting better, but they're always trying to catch up to what an incandescent can do.
This is why you can't just tint a fluorescent tube pink to get rid of the greenish cast, and expect to get the same results as using an incandescent. You still are getting a spike-filled spectrum of light, only pinker.
Fluorescents aren't particularly dimmable, and are really only good for flood light purposes. I do lighting design for a living, and the only option available for the work I do (Aside from very expensive HID fixtures, and even more expensive LED's...) is to use incandescent lamps. There are fluorescent lamps that dim, but they have much more expensive ballasts and dimming systems, and once again, can only really be used for floodlights. Also, as far as I know, fluorescents can only dim down to maybe 25% intensity, at which point they simply turn off. No good for what I do, but at least it might allow one to get that romantic mood in their dining room... I don't know how broad the scope of this legislation is in Australia, but I know that when I looked at replacing the 18 work lights in my theatre with fluorescents, the cost was going to be roughly $2000. Currently the cost to replace all the lights is about $100, and they're rated for 5000 hours vs. maybe 20,000 for the CFL's. I suppose the other $1600 would hopefully be made up in energy savings, but I'm skeptical.
When I was a DJ for wedding receptions and the like, all my music came from sources that *supposedly* included the cost of performance rights with the cost of their CD's. I was working through an agency, and they sent us out with a monster collection (I usually had the smaller, 24 CD version) that contained often requested songs in a nice cataloged format. I also bought new releases through a company called "Promo Only" that would only sell their stuff to working DJ's who could provide documentation that they were, in fact, playing before audiences several times a week every week.
I suppose now if a DJ wants to show people how to do the dance that commonly associated with the "Electric Boogie" they'll have to pay additional royalties...
Back in my Carnegie Mellon days, any old hardware that had outlived its usefulness would get put out in the hallways for students to pilfer. "Hallway Rule" they called it.. It was well known enough that in the instances where things had to be stored in the hallway that were NOT meant to be given away, professors would put numerous signs saying "NOT TRASH- DO NOT REMOVE" on them.
So, the moral is, Google simply needs to find a sufficient hallway.