We felt it is high time to write a brief blog article about the so-called “colour rendering index“, or CRI as its abbreviation is called. The CRI is often quoted in “Ra” (general color rendering index).

What does Wikipedia have to say about the CRI: “The color rendering index (CRI) (sometimes called color rendition index), is a quantitative measure of the ability of a light source to reproduce the colors of various objects faithfully in comparison with an ideal or natural light source. Light sources with a high CRI are desirable in color-critical applications such as photography and cinematography. It is defined by the International Commission on Illumination as follows: ‘Color rendering: Effect of an illuminant on the color appearance of objects by conscious or subconscious comparison with their color appearance under a reference illuminant’.”

As this sounds a wee bit complicated, we’ve prepared an article which (hopefully) explains a bit mor simple what the CRI is and does. Read the rest of this entry »

First of all we wish all our customers, homepage visitors and business partners a healthy and successful Happy New Year!

To celebrate this, we’d like to share a story with you from a client in the Netherlands: He is a specialist for rare plants and grows (among others) a special type of amaryllis from South Africa. Now after he was away for some travels and without proper lighting as usual, on his return the plant seemed to have died off and the leafs already showed an unhealthy yellow colour.

Even though he thought it was too late, he felt to give Viva-Lite a go and installed 2×80W Viva-Lite Full Spectrum tubes just to find that after only 3 days of being lit with Viva-Lite, his amaryllis came back to perfect condition adding “this result is absolutely amazing”:

Since then we had many enquiries and lot of feedback from people who use Viva-Lite for their plants and animals alike (e.g. fish, aquarium etc.), many with similar stories.

We thought of sharing this good news with you at the beginning of the New Year.

As part of milan design week 09 the german designer Ingo Maurer unveiled ‘the euro condom’ created in response to new EU guidelines that will see frosted light bulbs banned.

The product consists of a thin, heat-resistant silicone cover that turns a clear bulb into a frosted one:

The background of this idea is that many energy saving lamps look just like the new incandescend (bulb covered) condom lamp.

The following photos were taken by our distributor EEBS in Austria before and after equipping one of his clients (a museum) with Viva-Lite Full Spectrum Lighting:

Viva-Lite is happy to announce a cooperation with Domus, a well known lighting design and fixture manufacturer from Germany. Domus’s motto “Light to live with“ gives a good description of their line of lamps, and has been an essential part of their corporate philosophy since the company was founded back in 1966.

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The following lampshade was made for energy saving lamps – simply from “Recycled Water Bottles”.

You’ll not need much to accomplish this nice design yourself, simply a few empty water bottles (many coloured), 2l clear bottle, scissors, blade, adhesive tape will do. Have a look:

To learn about the complete instructions how to make this, follow this link here…

The Greener Gadgets Competition asked designers to explore the concept of “greener gadgets”.

The top 50 finalists in 2009 had some great ideas. Here is one that we liked – due to the nature of our business of course:

Bulb 2.0 is an energy-saving lamp which goes far beyond the traditional light bulb. Thus it becomes a modern element of design outshining the ordinary energy-saving lamp often perceived as unattractive.

To view all entries in the design competition, please click here…

Have you ever wondered why among all these millions of box shaped buildings, you will never see a house shaped like a shoe, a flower or a leaf?

This is the question, which set out artist Jan-Erik Andersson on a long and adventurous journey to build his own leaf shaped house in the middle of Turku city in Finland. The house project, called Life on a Leaf, is also the art part of Andersson’s studies for a doctorate degree in visual arts at the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki.

The light design in the house is inspired by the manager of AD LUX, Ilkka Pekanheimo’s ideas about using full spectrum light sources and indirect light. All lights, except from the installion in the dining room with 26 retro lamps from the 60:ties and 70:ties, are Viva-Lite full spectrum flourescent lights, many of them dimmable.

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The following test is not only fun but also an eye opener to the way we study, read and so on. But let’s go right to it.

Instructions:

1) Name the following colours aloud from up to down. Say aloud, as if there is nobody else in your room. So start from “red”:

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A research team from the University of Leeds working with the US National Institutes of Health found a high level of vitamin D – suggestive of high sun exposure – protected patients with malignant melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer.

Those with the lowest levels of vitamin D in their blood at diagnosis were 30 per cent more likely to suffer a recurrence of the disease after treatment than those who had the highest levels. Read the rest of this entry »