[jambutty]

I’d be obliged if you would show me where I have stated that my calculator works better from a particular SOURCE of light. My statement was about the INTENSITY of the light or as you seem to have trouble working out what I mean by intensity – it is the brightness of the light. Where it comes from is irrelevant. My 60w LE bulb gives off less light than a normal 60w bulb. It is hardly noticeable to the naked eye but a light meter or solar panel can detect the difference.

A solar panel will generate a DC electric current at a particular voltage when a light is shone on it. If the light is dull the electrical energy generated will be small. If the light is bright the electrical energy generated will be sufficient to power whatever device is connected to it, in my case a calculator. There is a limit on how much electrical energy a single solar panel will generate so shining a 10Kw light onto it won’t make it generate more.

Therefore the energy saving lightbulbs only show the parts we need.

Really? If we are to see all the various colours around us we need the full spectrum of white light. We can see all the colours around us by the light of a normal bulb and also a LE bulb. The BRIGHTNESSof the light will determine how well we will see all colours. You can’t see colours very well in full moonlight but you can in full sunlight.

A normal lightbulb shows the full visible spectrum from red to purple including all the different shades of all the colours, every single wavelength from 400nm to 700nm. Where as an energy saving one dosn't use every single wavelength, this means it uses less energy but it is NOT less bright. It just simply uses less energy because its not outputting the same amount of wavelengths but its not noticeable to the human eye.

Oh! Yes? Then explain this. I placed an LE bulb inside a closed box that had a tiny slit on one side to allow the light out. I placed a prism in front of the slit so that the beam of light shone onto one side of a prism. Close to the hypotenuse face of the prism I placed an upright white card. Guess what I saw? A full and complete spectrum. So if an LE bulb is not generating all the colours of the spectrum as white light as you claim, where did the colours come from? Any source of visible light will split into all the spectrum colours unless, as I have already stated, certain colours are filtered out. Then you will get a coloured light. If you remove all the red element of white light you get a cyan light. If you remove the blue element you get a yellow light. If you remove the green element you will get a violet light.

Open up a paint package like Paint Shop Pro and access the palette and play around with the RGB values. RGB at 000,000,000 produces black. RGB at 255,255,255 produces white. By varying the individual values of the RGB you can get 16,777,216 different colours.

The reason why an LE bulb uses less electrical energy than a normal bulb is because more of that energy is converted to visible light than to heat. Thus for a given amount of light you need less power for an LE bulb than you do for a normal bulb.

Oh and, the colour of light does matter because different wavelengths = different colours = different amounts of energy..... but in this case it dosn't because we're talking about all visible light and not blues/greens etc individually.

Eh?