The Truth About Lumens

Time：2015-08-20　Views：2786　Compile：SUNPER

There are numerous benefits for using lumens. In fact, some people are nowadays replacing their normal lights with advertised lumens with LED light and less lumen. It is highly recommended to replace your lights with these ones. Here are the top four reasons as to why you should do it.

1. Focused Lumens

LED light is usually directional while conventional light sources are Omni-directional and therefore they require reflectors in order to gather the light as well as focus to where it is required. For any reflection which is more than one bounce effectively loses the effect of lumen. This has been proved that it is possible to lose up to 30 percent of the effective lumens in a reflective process.

2. Quality of the Lumens

This is highly related to the CRI. The best explanation of this is determining how effective and efficient you can see when comparing the LED products to the High Pressure Sodium. It is common for some customers to tell you that the 20,000 lumens of the LED light normally appear brighter compared to the 60,000 lumens of the HPS. However, the basic truth is that you will require less quantity if you have higher quality lighting products.

3. Photopic and scotopic lumens

This is all about how a camera perceives lumens as well as how humans recognize lumens. Photopic lumens are simply the lumens which are detected by a machine which is very similar to a camera. The light meters register the photopic lumens. The scotopic lumens are generally lumens which are detected by a human eye. The LED produces light within these spectrums. Therefore, this means that we use the light which is perceived by the LED. It is very rare to see LED light producing the UV or IR spectrum. These wavelengths are usually invisible to people and thus they have no value to us in terms of vision.

The science of scotopic is highly related to a factor which allows one to adjust the photopic value so as to give you a true represnentation of how useful lumens are. This factor was developed by the scientists. It is used to adjust the effective value of lumen either up or down from an advertised photopic lumen listed on the package. Some of the lights such as HPS normally have a factor which reduces the lumen amount. On the other hand, LED has a factor of 1.7 or more. This means that lumens produced by it are more effective to us. Thus, less lumen is needed to do the job. Nowadays, there are light meters that display both scotopic and photopic levels.

4. Lumen degradation

It is very common for HID bulbs to lose significant amount of the initial lumens only after 5000 hours of life yet they are rated 20,000 hours. This means that the user is using the bulb which is not performing very well for the next 15,000 hours of life. Thus, just like the lumens degrade, the same way CRI does. This translates to a considerable drop in the effective light or lumen quality.

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