Box gives rendition index of 85. They have a site www.lightsofamerica.com but I have not been there. My model is 9265-T

Ah,
now I can find it on their web site. Looks pretty good, heaps of light!
Here's a tip, most fluros start out life looking a bit green, after around 100 hours the green phosphors fade a bit and then stabilize. So if you think it's a tad on the green side just leave it on for a few days. Haven't tried this myself, just a tip from an Osram engineer.

I think in general it;s best to go with daylight lighting. If there's existing lighting it still looks OK if it's orange, just adds a bit of warmth to the practicals. But when there's even a little bit of real daylight getting into the shot if everything else is tungsten it's a real problem, I've found the 'blue' bits coming in windows very hard to grade out.
Bob.

I'd be interested to hear how this lamp does for indirect general room lighting. I know it's meant to be an outdoor light, but how does it look if you stand in the middle of a dark room and point it straight at the ceiling, as compared to say, a halogen torchiere?

We have a halogen torchiere things that we bought back from the US. I didn't realise how dangerous they are until we got it home. Didn't use it for a while and then when we did an number of moths etc that had expired inside it burst into flames. I've since learned those lights are a major cause of house fires in the US!
You could probably replace the halogen lamp in one with the fluro lamp and ballast from the light Patrick has, you'd loose the dimmable aspect of course but it'd be way safer! Apart from that though in that kind of fitting the light dispersion would be pretty similar.
Bob.

OK - here we go...

things change - and as technology changes, the requirements of the new technology shift as well -

a little history... when I used to do "big" stuff - everything was shot in 35mm film. That "professional" medium was extremely demanding.
1. The film sensitivity was limited to 100 ASA. Faster was available, but yielded terrible results. So you HAD to light everything - PERIOD. Even shooting outside in daylight, we'd have a generator and huge arc lights to fill in the shadows. Yeah - you could use reflectors, but you couldn't count on consistant results (it's all got to cut together), if the sun was moving (and when does it NOT move?? :>))
2. The "normal" lens for 35mm film is 40 to 50mm with a good "portrait" lens at about 90 to 105mm. You had to have light to stop these babies down to a minumum of f4 to f5.6 to get enough depth of field to keep everything that you wanted (like the nose AND the ears, both moving) in focus. Generally, I'd shoot a feature at about f5.6 or f8 and light everything to that level.
3. The camera weighed between 35 lbs and 250 lbs. So you needed a dolly and a bunch of good strong helpers to move everything around.
4. The lights required to fulfill the above requirements were pretty big - with my basic light being a 5,000 watt - a couple of 8,000 watt soft lights and some 1,000 watt and 2,000 pin spots for perking up details. These lights were BIG weighing a minimum of 25lbs each and so required Big Stands and, again, a Big Crew to move around. Plus they are HOT. Most film sets I worked on ranged in the high 80's to low 100's. You had to turn off the AC for sound, and if the set was big, you'd typically have 10 to 25 of the above lights burning.

Now 16mm film haved all of the above requirements - why? Because the "normal" lens for a 16mm camera was only 25mm. Shorter lenses are easier to make with bigger f stops, so you'd automatically pick up a stop or two at the wide end, and your depth of field was automatically increased, because the shorter lens simply has a naturally greater depth of filed. I didn't do a lot of 16mm work, but when I did, I'd light to a f2.8 which would satisfy most focus problems.
As a rule of thumb, one f stop increase halves the size of the required light. So in 16mm all the 5,000 watt lights could be reduced to 2,000 watts and all the others followed suit. 16mm production was WAY easier on the lighitng requirement, the manpower, the size of the camera - everything! It just didn't LOOK as good.
During this time all video was produced on 2" format and uniformly looked like crap.
With the implementation of BetaCam SP, video began to look up as a medium for artists. The move from tubes to chips sweetened the final image. No way was it FILM, but it could be acceptible in vast amounts of work. The sensativity of the chip was comparable to film, and the lens length comparable to 16mm. So you had depth of field problems (too much) but it was a much less expensive medium to shoot in.
In the late 90's one of my camera operators introduced me to the Sony VX1000 - I bought one the next day (and still use it today). What a mind blast. 3 pounds. Low light sensitivity. No "sound blimp" necessary. Gorgeous color. I shot a commercial for American Express and they loved the look. The only problem? WAY too much depth of field - solution - shoot lots of close-ups. Avoid medium shots like the plague.

At just about this time, I left NY and my high end commercial career and began a high end industrial/corporate career. The DV camera became my number one axe of choice. I still shoot most of my stuff today on a PD150, PD170 and that old VX1000. I light like film and my footage is beautiful. 25 man crews have been replaced by 4 to 6 people.

But it took me all this time to digest the technology shift in it's entirety.

First - I was lecturing at a trade show in DC and wandered around the show itself, fascinated by the explosion in light weight flourescent units. As an old film guy - flourescent light was too be totally avoided. Everything would look like it was shot through a "snot green" fitler. No way to fix it, either.
But the new digital cameras allowed you to white balance and get great results.
I was impressed.
Now in the Really Old Days, I had been a fashion photograper. We only shot black and white, so color balance was not an issue. Flourescent lights were the BEST. Soft, yielding modeled light. Cool to the touch. Cheap to buy. Great stuff. When type C color came in, we all shifted to strobe lighting with it's natural daylight color and used umbrellas to duplicate the soft flourescent look. We threw away the flourescent fixtures, and I never thought about them again.

So - I got back from DC (with all this submerged subliminal knowledge stewing inside), and as I was wandering the aisles of Home Depot (Xmas tree time) I noticed the barrels of those cheapo coiled bulb screw in flourescent light bulbs. Would this work??

I bought a dozen of the 23 watt draw (light output 100 watt) bulbs and a bunch of plastic screw in fixtures. I then made a simple box out of foam core and glued the fixtures in place. I put a grid from the flourescent department in front, and a little diffuion in front ot that. What a light!! Built out of foam core. Held together by gaffer tape and velcro. Folded down to 2" thick. Super light weight. Totally cool to the touch. Soft. And plenty for my "new tech" digi camera setups.

I'm still playing with this whole new concept in lighting design, and so I pass along the inspiration to you all. You MUST white balance to use these lights. And I am still augmenting them with little 150 watt and 250 watt pin spots. But my main lighting sources are now:
cheap, lightweight, low draw, cool to the touch, easy to move around and soft, soft, soft - i.e. perfect for video.

Feedback welcomed.
best to all for a happy holiday -

v

Great idea, the "do it yourself" soft light out of foam core, especially with a flourescent source.

Along the same lines, we've been using a Chinese Lantern I built based on George Odell's instructions -- http://www.dvinfo.net/articles/lighting/clantern1.php It's easy to make and provides excellent soft lighting for interviews and the like. Haven't tried it with a flourescent light yet, but will now.

The flourescent shop light looks like a winner, too. Thanks for the heads up on that. Too bad the bulb has a mogul base and will only work in the manufacturers holder. It looks like it would be a good bulb for other types of lighting instruments as well.

Happy holidays to all,

Jack