Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Konica Minolta Sensing Americas and B&W Tek announce SpectraRad Xpress miniature irradiance meter

RAMSEY, USA: Konica Minolta Sensing Americas Inc. (KMSA) has partnered with B&W Tek, Inc., an advanced instrumentation company producing optical spectroscopy and laser systems to introduce a new, lower cost option for LED characterization.

Together, they announced the new miniature spectral irradiance meter, the SpectraRad Xpress, a new addition to the SpectraRad product line.

The SpectraRad Xpress is a miniature spectral irradiance meter designed for field, industrial and laboratory light measurement applications with a USB 2.0 interface. A transmissive cosine corrector is coupled to a spectrometer which is irradiance calibrated against a NIST traceable tungsten light source.

BWSpec software, included, provides for the characterization and measurement of many lighting devices and systems. The standard software features include time line recording, data smoothing, illuminance (lux), chromaticity, color temperature, externally triggered pulsed light capturing, and other data-handling functions.

The SpectraRad Xpress is ideal for lamp and LED characterization (requires input optic option), color analysis, photostability testing, photobiology and photochemistry.

"The advantage to users is that the SpectraRad Xpress is the lowest cost, high resolution, high sensitivity, CCD array spectral irradiance meter from KMSA," said Randy Klimek, new product project manager for KMSA.

"This solution offers a high dynamic range with superior long term stability. It is ideal for various applications including low light level detection and long-term monitoring applications."

The SpectraRad Express offers significant improvements over traditional filter based technology instruments. Filter based instruments have been desired for certain properties (cost, speed and portability) but lack the resolution to accurately describe the spectral characteristics of a light source. Filter based instruments only acquire three data points across the entire spectrum of light to yield colorimetric values. This is accomplished by the use of filters corresponding to the normal human eye response.

These filters can only be manufactured to a certain degree of accuracy. Due to these facts, filter based meters are susceptible to errors because of the deviation of the filter response from the ideal human eye response and the lack of resolution needed to accurately describe narrow bandwidth light sources.

The SpectraRad Xpress avoids these problems at a comparable cost, higher speed and small footprint because it acquires hundreds of data points across the visible spectrum. The 2048 pixel linear CCD array provides the precision required to accurately measure narrow bandwidth light sources or LEDs.

Having multiple sensors also enables the unit to report spectral data and display spectral graphs, making it the ideal instrument for evaluating LEDs, which is today's dominant light source.

The SpectraRad Xpress will be sold and distributed by KMSA & B&W Tek, Inc. in North America beginning January 2011.

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