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Over the last couple of years
this style of lamp have started to become increasingly
common. There have however started to be an increasing number
of cheap imitations too. The better lamps generally employ
lamps with a proper dichroic colour filter on the front, and a dichroic
cold light mirror on the reflector. The cheaper versions will
skimp on one of both of these, often using a simple coloured coating on
the lens. The results of this tend to be a lamp which will
fade in colour, suffer from the coating flaking off, or in some cases,
even the front lens cracking in normal use.
This one however isn't one of the cheap imitations. It's a
very nicely finished example of the technology, only slightly let down
by the use of a horizontal rather than axial filament (which is
slightly misaligned too). So the beam isn't
perfect. The metal rim used to hold the front glass into this
example is a nice touch from a cosmetic point of view, and works well
from a functional point of view. The reflector in this lamp
is only partly textured, this helps to keep the beam narrow (just as
well given the 10° spec), as you might expect, this introduces a couple
of slight artefacts into the beam as mentioned earlier. If
the lamp were being used to light a display, this would not be
noticeable - however I'd say that it does detract somewhat if it's
being used to create something like a colour wash over a white wall or
something similar - when the artefacts are more visible.
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