these lights okay?

[señor_pescados_felices]

I'm tired of taking crappy pics of all my sweet fish like my blue fin jag and my orange aro and my lei and I think maybe some better lightin would work and I see shop lights suggested alot so I got a 48" shop light hood and picked up a GE "plants and aquarium " and a GE "Daylight" both 40 watt bulbs.

I'm assuming obviously that the pants and aquarium one is safe,the stats on that are
light output:1,900 lumens
cri:/irc: 90 (dont know what that is?)

and the stats on the daylight bulb are

light putput:3,050 lumens
color temp.:6500k (?)
cri:75

so are thse okay for an aquarium?I put them on the 75 to see how it looked and it a bit much I dont know but I was thinking on the 220?

 

[Wolf3101]

I use that same set up on two of my tanks. The 100 gal is unplanted (oscars) and the 150 is lightly planted so I use two of the daylight bulbs. my fixtures are mounted to the wooden hoods. I'll be using two of the fixtures on the 240 once its set up. I recomend picking up a set of bulb shields (rubber ended plastic guards that go over the tubes) in the intrest of safety. They only run about $5.00 each and contain the debris in case a bulb shatters.

 

[gasser]

CRI stands for color rendering index. the higher the more it approximates sunlight in its spectrum. 100 would be sunlight. 90 is not bad but I know a good daylight Metalhalide is around 96 CRI.

The higher the number the more balanced the spectrum. A low CRI may have significant holes in the spectrum even though the final color temp in K is high.

Color temp in K is a rating on the color of the bulb overall and does not reflect the actual spectral balance per say. Notice one of your choices has a bulb with a low CRI but a color temp of 6500K. 6500 should be a crisp white light but obviously has some holes in the spectrum and may not show your fish colors as well as a bulb with a cri over 90. The lower the color temp number is the more yellow the bulb will look.

Hope that helps.