Since it's that time of year again for my fellow northerners with SAD, film lights can be wonderfully bright, and the heat is a welcome side benefit!
Screw Verilux with their overpriced "10,000 lux" 10W panel (only at less than 6 inches from your face), instead get a high-CRI studio light over my reading chair and I'll be happy all winter.
Or you can just buy 490nm LED bulbs, which is the wavelength the photoreceptors in the eye related to circadian rhythms are most sensitive to. Just be aware that they should be off to the sides and ideally indirect, because concentrated blue light is actually hazardous to the eye.
One can also buy a couple of bright, high-CRI LED bulbs for one's existing lights and save themselves about $650, because the difference between those and the studio lights is typically red spectrum coverage, which is not relevant for circadian rhythm / SAD treatment. The film/TV LED lights are also designed to have a really smooth spectrum, minimizing gaps. If you want to do that...fine, but please don't advise people to waste lots of money on something completely unnecessary.
I assure you, a double-height high-CRI LED strip running along the edges of the room will throw a fuckton of light without the issues caused by having two very intense point sources, namely shadows and glare.
There's almost never a problem with too much blue light in the high CRI bulbs (in fact, the people doing the spectrograms are usually looking for bulbs without the high blue spectrum spikes, and many people are looking for bulbs without the blue spikes (and they're hard to find!)
Yeah – to be clear, I am not doing it for any particular element of physical health or circadian rhythm, I am just trying to emulate sunlight for aesthetic reasons (yum, red spectrum coverage)
Smart bulbs sacrifice on light quality for color and dumb bulbs can't adjust color temperature (even dumbly!). Studio lighting is expensive but has both.
I love the idea of a high-CRI LED strip, because, yeah, an intense point source is really not ideal to light a room. But the strip would need to be bi-color, but such a thing probably exists. I just moved and I have zero ceiling sockets, so A19 is dead to me :(
Ya, that style. The ones from the dollar store for potato chip bags have that nice wide mouth, so it can grab the monitor and then the light rests on the monitor but is kept from falling by the clip.
You can clip one vertical on the vertical edge and one on the horizontal edge of the monitor. Just don't party on your desk or move it too much.
I am currently using a Fovitec Bicolor 650 LED panel - it was cheap and I am cheap. I replaced the power supply with a higher-wattage unit because it flickered at max power, that might be enough to make me not recommend it but it works for me.
I previously used some adhesive LED strip lights on a 24x24 plate of aluminum. If DIY electronics are your aesthetic, go for it!
I personally use a 28600lm, 2ft, 220W linear bay light from superbrightleds.com for $130. The CRI is only 80+, but I personally don't think I can tell the difference. Like the other poster, I am cheap, but like actually cheap in that I made a spreadsheet to get the greatest lumens/$.
I wouldn't suggest going brighter though, 30klm is already bright enough I can't look at the light directly and need to bounce it off the walls for comfort. The cat doesn't seem to mind though: https://i.imgur.com/aTegmqR.mp4
I found that 200-300W is about the optimum from a dollars per high quality lumen perspective. The SmallRig COB lights are great if you can get them at a discount.
Screw Verilux with their overpriced "10,000 lux" 10W panel (only at less than 6 inches from your face), instead get a high-CRI studio light over my reading chair and I'll be happy all winter.