As djozz said, yes it will cause a tint shift of some sort, how much and to what degree, I do not have the equipment to test but his results backup my anecdotal evidence.
I have noticed that my high CRI warmer tint lights don’t seem to read as low on this tube with the diffusors as the old style without them. I still round them up but not as much now.
The end point though is that the exact tint hitting the meter really doesn’t matter all that much for what we are doing. This is a cheap, crude and basic version of a very expensive piece of equipment. It was never designed to be perfect, just as good as I could make it for a reasonable price. I have never said otherwise.
Don’t have an extra video card now but I plan to upgrade when the Nvidia 7nm comes out, which is about a year from now. I can send you my current one. I’ve been so busy with work and family that I still haven’t had time to get to going through my old harddrives to transfer out useful data. Probably will be sometime next year before I can get to it looking at my current schedule.
No worries at all. Thanks a lot for the offer, when you upgrade I would be interested in that indeed. By then the mod options we have been talking about might be ready.
For now just trying to get something in the system that will at least run all 3 of my monitors and play some games, I am so spoiled I just can’t handle not having multiple monitors anymore lol.
Hi
I am so glad that see you have made this type of LumenTube yourself
But I have some questions that maybe you like to answer me
First : Is anyone else made lumen tubes lnstead of lumen speheres? In Theory I think that you are right, But I just want to know , is this typical or is it your invention? and did you test it and what was the result and accuracy?
Second : In British standard, As I remember, It says that Lumen Sphere’s paiting must have more than 90% reflectivity , And I have searched and found that only paints based on Barit can have that reflection , and paints based on Titan have less than 85% reflectivity , Now I like to know, did you paint inside of yourtube? and Is it isolated from outside?
Third : I want to use this lumen tube idea for Luminaires that are generally much larger than flashlights , Is it possible to change the plan , so it can fit larger lights , and does it result well for all types of luminares? (for example wide beam or narrow beam ones as well)
Fourth : Is it possible to use standard LED Diffusers as diffuser?
Thanks alot for reading.
Texas_Ace did not invent this type of device. They have been built over the years by lots of people, but TA has refined it by adding diffuser panels which really helps to blend the light better. Usually people build lumen tubes or spheres theirself and you get a lot of variations, some of which are not so good. TA made several based on a template so a lot of people could have the same design and get better accuracy. If you plan to build your own, you will want to get a calibration light to test it. You will also need to devise a way to change the opening size if it’s for a flashlight.
It has the bare plastic white interior. No painting is used. You dont have to worry about light getting in from the outside.
The tube design works well for flashlights. It can capture the light and mix it up, integrate it, before it gets to the sensor. I’m not sure what a luminare is, can you explain?
If it’s really big or spreads light from several directions you may have to use a different design, such as a sphere or similar.
You probably can, as long as it spreads the light evenly. TA used a certain type and number of diffusers so the lux meter displayed the lumens with no math involved. This is a nice feature and makes measurements faster.
TA….you use black tape for tube calibration, right?
Thinking about spectral response errors that all cheap meters have gave me an idea - could we compensate for the errors by callibrating with a carefully chosen paint?
F.e. let’s assume that your luxmeter redponds too strongly to blue light (it likely does). A greyish-yellow paint would absorb more blue than other colours, possilby reducing the error. Am I righ”t?
No need for colour, any white diffusor will remove some blue light due to scattering more than other wavelengths. Light that has gone through the white tube has warmed up too, but will that be the right compensation for a luxmeter with spectral arrors, who knows?
Scattering is directly proportional to wavelength. LX-1010B which I take as a representative “cheap meter” has many times too high sensitivity for 440 nm. Warming up by going through the pipe? I guess that you mean that pipes are not pure white but slightly yellow right?
What would it take to try to apply a measured correction? I’m not sure but I’ll write down how do I see it.
1. Prepare:
a tested luxmeter with a known spectral sensitivity curve
incan bulb
spectrometer
2 integrating tubes
2. Measure the spectral error introduced by the tube.
(optional) do it at various points of the exit to ensure that the tube integrates well
3. Multiply the spectral errors of luxmeters and the tube. This gives the total error of the tube. Take a negative of that - that’s the ideal corrective colour.
4. Go to paint mixing company. They’ll use software that calculates the optimum blend of a dozen of pigments to produce spectrum that matches your as close as possible
5. Apply the right amount of paint to compensate for the spectral errors (I don’t know how to determine that w/out comparing that tube with a reference)
6. Then - tune with black tape.
7. Apply the same amount of paint to the other tube. Test it.
Yes, it’s a lot of work.
But if it produced improvement that could be blindly applied to other tubes of exactly the same construction, that might push a budget tube correctness up.
Would the effect be significant? I have a hunch that if it was then integrating sphere companies would be doing it already, seems like simple paint + simple filters would be cheaper than the whitest paint + sophisticated filters.
So…I’m not sure if this idea is good at all. And I’m not sure how would one implement it. But the potential improvement seems nice to me.
And maybe someone knows better and can improve the cost and value estimations.
I expect that most paint pigments affect more than one region of the visible spectrum so that it is impossible to create a combination that produces a tailormade absorption spectrum. It is probably why good luxmeters are so expensive: it takes exotic materials to produce a filter with an exact absorption spectrum.
I was going to say basically the same. While a good idea on paper I have a feeling it would be quite difficult to make it work in practice and would net you other oddities. Such as I foresee different tint lights having the lumen skewed due to the paint absorbing more from one LED then another.
Putting us right back in the situation of having to round the number up or down to account for it.
Don’t get me wrong, it is a good idea and would be cool to test but we are talking dozens of hours of testing with some expensive equipment that most of us do not have at the minimum. That is a lot of time for what amounts to an almost unnoticeable to the human eye change.
You signed up to this forum and your very first post was a bunch of links to this company?
How did you even find this topic? It is 6 months old. Are you a flashlight person or did you just search online for people talking about PVC pipe? You realize this looks highly suspicious, right? This is the exact same behavior that a lot of spammers use. I just want you to be aware of that.
JasonWW, just go to one of the links and on top of the page click on "about" the company. That company's name looks very similar to the poster's. Coincidence?
I am going to start building my own rudimentary lumen tube based on ideas from this and Matt smith , and others.
I was hoping to find out what material was used for the diffuser sheet in the junctions of Texas Ace’s version? Or what could be used in place of his diffuser sheets if the material he used is difficult to source?