 |
This strongly tinted photoflood lamp has a much deeper colour than usual, and was designed for portraiture with black and white film materials. This was found to deliver especially beautiful rendering of skin tones. The original literature claims a colour temperature of 5200K vs the 4800K of normal blue photofloods, however measurement reveals a much higher CCT of 11000K. The measured flux is only 5500lm vs the claimed 9400lm, perhaps due to large variations in the thickness of the hand-blown bulb glass.
The bulb is heavily frosted on its inside surface and delivers a softly diffused light which is easy on the subject's eyes, and does not lead to such severe pupil contraction as other high intensity lamps. It can also be used as a supplementary light source with 'Daylight' film materials, but owing to its unusual spectrum was not recommended as the sole light source - some extra light from standard 4800K photofloods being preferred to attain a more natural colour balance
Aside from the particularly elegant blue glass bulb, the rest of this lamp is similar to standard versions. It employs a single-coil tungsten filament driven at around 3200K, achieving about 300 hours life - considerably longer than the 10 hours of the equivalent 3400K clear and 4800K blue photofloods. The filament is supported on a conventional soft glass stem assembly, and a baffle plate of mica in the neck serves to reduce cap temperature. The mica is of the expanded type, having been treated in a hydrogen furnace to cause partial delamination and improve its infrared reflectivity. The cap is of brass & vitrite, affixed to the bulb with the typical cementless crimping system as found on other GE high wattage mogul screw-based lamps. |