| IIn article , "hob" | wrote: |> Draperies, silk lamp shades, and some plastic shades absolutely also do |> not like fluorescent lights, nor does fine art - and many things in |> bathrooms are plastic and will yellow in fluorescent light. |> | Hello, and while I can't comment on the above, I can say the only thing | stopping me from exclusively using fluorescent fixtures in my home is that | my eyes quickly get fatigued while reading under artificial electric light | other than incandescent. Sincerely,
That happens to me, too. This has been said to be due to things like poor color and flicker. But what I believe is the true cause is continuity of the spectrum (specifically, lack thereof). FL light has 2 narrow and 1 wide spike in the spectrum, with a gap in between. Eyes (and especially when corrective lenses are applied) do not focus all colors uniformly and will tend to focus somewhere in the middle of the nornally continuous white light spectrum. However, a spikey spectrum creates a situation where there are 2 or even 3 distinct focal zones, and the eye wants to jump between them. This happens with sharp edges of black on white where the boundary is present in all the spiek wavelengths. What the eye sees is disjoint boundaries, and thus it tends to jump in focus. The fatigue is from the eyes doing a lot more focusing work (including opening and closing the iris more to try to find a consistent focus).
If you can't have broad continuous white light, then what you need is to confine the spectrum to a single color, red or green. Red is actually best, but green works reasonably well. A true monochromatic yellow would also work (e.g. not a yellow made from mixing red and green). One way to get such light is a deep color gel over a FL light source. Another is using single color LEDs (all the same color).
I have hypothesized that a mix of a sufficient number of single wavelengths would approximate a continuous spectrum well enough for the eyes to no longer have this problem. A future project plan is to build a light box made up of a large number of different LED chips. I've found at least 22 distinct wavelengths I could get some LEDs in. Then I'll need to balance them to achieve some approximation of white.
I experienced the above problem with a light source based on a white LED powered directly with DC. So I know flicker is not the issue (despite the fact that I can see it in virtually all FL lighting). I also experience it with CRT screens where I have addressed the issue with selective colors for the text so that the boundary between text and background is only in a single color (remaining colors are then at a uniform level and present no edges at the text). I can have red text on black, or I can have yellow text on green and it's the same red edge. Cyan text on white presents a red edge in reverse (but that's too much light for the available contrast). Magenta text on white (green edging) almost works. I end up using orange on dim green most often.