Colour Accurate Lighting

We offer a few alternatives for your colour accurate lighting:

• SoLux bulbs, the very best of all colour accurate lights - unfortunately only available in MR16 downlight fittings for track or ceiling installation.
• GrafiLites which use an extremely high quality tube and come in a ready-to-go desktop friendly lamp package.
• Fiilex V70 lamp - a quality LED print viewing lamp with four colour temperature settings and ability to dim the light down to 20%.
• JUST Florescent Tubes - very high quality tubes for use for colour proofing or to dramatically improve your general lighting.

When choosing the right SoLux bulbs the first thing to understand is that all SoLux bulbs are only available as halogen downlight type bulbs with an MR16 (AKA GU5.3) fitting.

In Australia, this fitting is generally only found in ceiling fittings, or track lighting, and not in lamps. Please check your light fittings for compatibility with both the fitting and your chosen wattage before purchasing bulbs.

Once you are sure you have a suitable fitting for the bulbs, the choice comes down to 50 watt versus 35 watt, and normal bulbs versus the black backed bulbs.

Wattage:
If you are using your lights at ceiling height, you will want the 50W globes. If you are using track lighting, then you will most likely want to use the 35W bulbs as the 50s will be too bright at the shorter distance.

Normal versus black backed:
The black backed bulbs are definitely more expensive, but they are also definitely the most accurate. The black backing blocks unfiltered light from leaving the bulb through the back of the lamp. This unfiltered light can bounce of your fitting and come back out the front of the fixture, and will have a warmer colour temperature. This will mean your regular bulb will, in practice, usually have a slightly lower colour temperature than stated, but it does depend greatly on your fixture.

If you want the most accurate light, go for the black backed bulbs.

GrafiLite lamps are a great colour accurate option for setting up a small, even portable, print viewing area.

The GrafiLite Mode illuminates an area around A3+ in size. It is a really simple system with a great quality light source. The GrafiLites are standard 240V lamps complete with GrafiLite colour accurate tubes. Just plug in, switch on, and be assured that you're evaluating your prints in very good quality light.

We use a couple of the Mode models in house to light a print table for print review - this system is used mainly for art reproduction work which requires very high accuracy.

The Fiilex V70 is our new LED lamp option for print evaluation. It offers similar colour accuracy to our GrafiLite lamp but is more energy efficient and has a long 50,000 hour lifespan.

It also features four colour temperature settings, and the ability to dim the light down to 20% making it a very simple solution for print viewing, and an excellent general purpose, high quality task light. 

You can use these tubes simply to improve the general lighting in your work area (the improvement over standard fluorescent tubes is dramatic!) - they're the same tubes used in commercial lighting booths specifically used for pre-press scenarios, so they are excellent.