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Hi, I’d like to buy a daylight bulb to put in a desk lamp or similar in my workroom, it’s a rather dark room and I have trouble viewing prints I print off, obviously it makes things worse that the lamps I have are tungsten or halogen.
Trouble is I’m unsure what to buy, a quick look on the net and you come up with daylight bulbs with various fittings but they seem aimed at sufferers of seasonal affective disorder. Common sense tells me that they should be equally suitable for viewing prints but am I wrong? Maybe there is some special knowledge that I need, or something specifically photographic. I did see a little desk lamp in the colour management section of Morris photo but it’s very expensive and probably too specialist/unnescessary
Any advice gratefully received, thanks, Ruth
Craft shops used to sell them, but I'm not sure whether they're still available.
As Penny says go to a craft shop and they call them craft lights
available in 60w and 100w BC & ES if you really get stuck give me a PM I sell them at work but they're not the best object for posting 
Geoff
I use a two-tube desklight that uses D65 fluorescent lamps that are marked F15W/55.
Be very careful when choosing "daylight" lamps because a lot of the aren't. Try to see this month's issue of Imagemaker, the SWPP mag.
The tubes i mentioned are 6500 Kelvin Fluorescent tubes, designed to provided standardised lighting for colour critical environments such as pre-press and photography.
Which simply replaces the fluorescent tube in a standard fitting
Osram 865 tubes are 6500K, this is true, but there is a lot more to it than that.
They are not a continuous spectrum, they are cold 'northlight' and colour reproduction is not as good as it could be.
Colour temperature 6500 K
Colour rendering group 1B
Colour rendering index Ra 80 ... 89
Light colour 865
Osram Lumilux delux 954 tubes available from about 18W - 55W are just about the best available regarding consistent and accurate viewing (or studio lighting), with a continuous spectrum and better (less blue) temperature but you would need a 2G11 fitting:
Base / Cap 2G11 4 pin
Colour rendering group 1A
CRI 95
Colour Temperature 5400 kelvin
I could dig out the spectral output graph of the 954 for anyone interested.
I know this is probably beyond what the OP would be looking for owing to the 2G11 fitting, but thought it would be of general interest too.
Tungsten 'craft lamps' are not accurate or consistent colour, run hot and use 4 - 5x more electrickery per lumen output.
Rich
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