I just posted the part III of the Build Your Own Metal Halide (Low Cost HMI) Fresnel in the articles section of the blog. In this part, I talk about what we’ve been up to behind the scenes to leverage all this information to create what we call the Hard Light Series which will be the perfect complement to our already existing and soon to expand Soft Light Series. Part IV will be posted shortly where I talk about the standard Osram bulb choices in the Hard Light series and the equivalent replacements that can be had for lower cost.

I got into this “Cool Lights” business of mine because I thought prices were outrageous on pro level fluorescent fixtures. You can see all over this site the manifestation of what I decided to do about it; starting with the Cool Lights video and ending with low cost fluorescent fixtures. Well, I’ve gotten the same feeling again on another lighting technology: HMI. I was searching for an energy efficient hard or point light source to complement our fluorescent Cool Lights Softlight Series product line and was learning about HMI as the natural solution. Crazy prices though and no good reason at this point to have them so high.

In the previous two articles in this series we talked about building your own metal halide fresnel for under $500 as my own way of educating the world on what’s going on with HMI’s, the ridiculous reasons they have been artificially overpriced and also as the introduction for my own Cool Lights Hardlight Series. I’m afraid it will take some serious re-education (and perhaps even de-programming) for some people to accept that it’s possible to offer “HMI” for the prices I will be. In this, the next-to-last installment of this multipart article I will talk about our progress on the metal halide Hardlights. In Part IV, we’ll talk about the bulbs we chose and their equivalents on the market… (more…)