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Metal Halide lights for indoor gardening, will they work as HMI's?


Guest Greg Moulton

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Guest razerfish

I have some metal halide lights for indoor gardening. They have daylight spectrum, are very intense -- require a ballast like HMI's. But can they be substituted for HMI's? If not, why?

 

If they can, you have a very cheap alternative, maybe $300 for a bulb and ballast compared to thousands of $ for a HMI.

 

Anyone ever tried this?

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I have some metal halide lights for indoor gardening. They have daylight spectrum, are very intense -- require a ballast like HMI's. But can they be substituted for HMI's? If not, why?

 

If they can, you have a very cheap alternative, maybe $300 for a bulb and ballast compared to thousands of $ for a HMI.

 

Anyone ever tried this?

 

Not the same lights you are having, but I guess similar ones,

The only thing that you should check, is that maybe they will have different colour temperature.

So you will need a colour meter (a three colours one),to check them for small correction filtration like minus or plus green filters.Or even some CTO or CTB.Also you have to use them when your camera settings have an 180 shuter at 24fps.

Dimitrios Koukas

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Most commercial discharge lights still have a bit of green spike in their spectrum, requiring some slight minusgreen gel for correction to daylight (may also need a little CTO or CTB).

 

These days I just use my little $150 digital still camera as a color meter. Works great. It exaggerates color temps just a bit, so when you get your gel pack looking right on your camera you know it won't look any worse on video or film.

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