I see those full spectrum lights advertised now and again. The ones they use to treat Seasonal Affective Disorder, that emit all the frequencies found in natural sunlight. Supposedly they can improve your mood in the winter months and make reading and other tasks less taxing on the eyes. So, anyone have one? Does it live up to the hype?
I’ve never heard of this. It sounds ike a scam.
Get an ordinary tungsten bulb. (That is, your ordinary everyday light bulb that you screw into a socket) It emits all the frequencies found in ordinary sunlight.
(Fluorescent lights have classically been the antithesis of this, although I hear that the new screw-in ones do a pretty good job of aping daylight.)
I dunno about mood improvement per se, but I know I much prefer both working and reading with a full-spectrum light, and both working and reading improve my moods in general. I know diddly about light frequencies, but I have noticed considerably less eyestrain. I should also point out that I work with color, and there seems to be a very big difference in how the colors look with the full spectrum light.
No, it’s not a scam. Scientific studies have shown that they work, and doctors frequently recommend them for people who suffer from seasonal depression. They’re pretty common in regions in the far north. My mood and energy level take a nose-dive in the winter, so I bought one, but I haven’t used it frequently enough to be able to say whether it really works. Sometimes it seemed to make me feel a little wired, but I’m not positive it was the light causing it. I’m going to start using it now that winter’s around the corner.
I got a couple of those, thinking I could do my part to conserve electricity. I hate them. They emit an odd, cold light, although I’ll admit they flicker a whole lot less than the old-style bulbs, and they make things look the wrong color. I had to take one out of the lamp in the kitchen because it made things like spaghetti sauce look brown.
I didn’t think that regular incandescent bulbs were the same as full-spectrum light, but then I used to think you couldn’t get a sunburn through glass, so I’m obviously not one to give expert advice.
I’ve got full-spectrum bulbs in my art studio. I don’t know about the mood thing, but I agree with LifeOnWry that they are definitely better to work under than flourescent or ordinary tungsten, especially when it comes to color. I don’t see how ordinary bulbs could be the same when the light doesn’t look the same and things don’t look the same under the light.
Yes, but not in the right proportions. Incandescent lights, being somewhat lower temperature than the sun, emit much more red light and less blue light than the sun. I’m not quite sure how full spectrum bulbs work, but I guess they either use a filter to adjust the color or use a higher temperature filament.
In my lab work I once used a research grade solar simulator, which simulates the exact spectrum of sunlight. It always amazed me how beautiful and soothing that light was. When I was working with it late at night I could almost feel my brain getting confused.
GE makes a line of ostensibly full-spectrum flourescent lights named “Sunshine”, that are packaged in bright orange & yellow at Wal-Mart.
I just bought one for my desk lamp(18" tube), and it’s kind of odd- it has a very noticeable bluish tint to it- supposedly like noonday sunlight.
I have a daylight bulb, and the glass is blue. I bought it for my sewing, to see the thread colours properly.
We use full spectrum lights (GE’s Sunshine bulbs indeed are cheaper than the ones found in health food stores) because they seem to provide more accurate color. That really helps in the kitchen. I believe most produce departments utilize full spectrum lights as well. My artist friends whose work depends on accurate rendition of color also use them.
I find that the full-spectrum bulbs tend to make my eyes ache unless I’m wearing sunglasses, but then, my eyes are light sensative. My Mom on the other hand, definately has an improvement in mood if we use them in the winter months.
For my purposes, a simple solitary ‘soft white’ bulb in a low wattage works best for me. (And yes, my Mom thinks I’m nus.) 
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We’ve got one. I’m not sure if it works or not, all I know is its really f’in bright. Imagine staring into a 40W bulb times 10. I just enjoy inviting people over, standing behind it and blinding them as I flick it on.
For wjhat it’s worth, a 5900 degree K blackbody has virtually the same spectrum as the sun, and a tungsten bulb running at that temperature is pretty close to a blackbody. In other words, crank up your wattage to that temperature and you’ll have a “full-spectrum lamp”, with the same frequencies and relative proportions as the sun. The problem is that the bulb won’t last anywhere near as long as a lower-wattage bulb, because the lifetime typically goes as the twelfth power of the voltage. Those bulbs are gonna burn out fast. (And the above posts suggest that FSLs are burning hot).
The other way of making an ordinary incandescent bulb mimic the relative proportion of the frequencies in sunlight is to use what are called “light balancing filters”. The irony here is that, in order to make the proportions correct, you have to block out a lot of the light toward the red end of the spectrm and very little of the blue, so you end up with a lot less overall energy coming through. The light looks like the light from the sun, but a lot weaker.
We use them in the winter because we live in Oregon, where the sun rarely shines for about 6 months straight over the winter. I do notice a definite difference in my general mood since we got them. It’s dreary here come January or so, and it hasn’t quit raining since October.
I don’t use them in the summer, though, mostly because they are really bright, and it forces me to go outside if I need the sun. I also purposely put lower wattage bubls everywhere in the summer.