9 Nov
2011
9 Nov
'11
8:10 p.m.
I don't beleive there is a suitable alternatic [to
incandescents] for
_all_ applciations.
Of course not.
1) Over my lathe (I am worried about flicker, perhaps
unnecessarily)
Probably. I'm reasonably sure modern fluorescents, including CFLs,
flicker at multiple KHz, not at 50/60 or 100/120 Hz.
2) In my copyling stand (You can't get a
continouls spectrum from any
CFL that I've seen, so using them a a light source for colour
photogrpahy is a non-staeter)
Well, possibly excepting some special applications, yeah.
3) In the white light source in the darkroom (CFLs
have a long
afterglow [...]).
Just recently I got some white LEDs. They're supposedly
high-brightness, and they aren't kidding; I (conservatively) hooked it
up to 5V with a 1K resistor and got a "that's _bright_" light. Then I
masured and found it was pulling about 2.2mA - and it's rated for some
ten times that. Running it at about 21mA, it was on the bench pointing
up, and in the middle of the day there was a clear area of brightness
visible on the ceiling, some six feet above the bench. This wasn't
full direct sunlight, but it wasn't a cavern, either; holy crap that
little bugger is bright. It was burning about 58 mW and probably
turning almost all of it into light.
Its spectrum was pretty close to continuous, based on a DVD used as a
diffraction grating. It topped out in the high blue, a little bit
before the visible violet fades out into the long ultraviolet, but
aside from that it looked about as good as possible given how crude the
measurement instrument was.
4) In the balaset unit I sue when repairing SMPSUs
(you don't
honestly think that CFLs have the right V-I characteristic for this,
do you?)
I have a stash of incandescents which I'm keeping specifically for uses
where their electrical characteristics are important, such as that.
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