more sweet unbiased review action. the hunt continues!

Ok I need to sell one of my kidney for these sexy mitras. Wonder how many can I get for my kidney.

In my opinion, considering the feature set, the build quality and the actual amount of light output, I would consider the Mitras moderately priced :-). In other words, you can spend the same amount of money elsewhere and end up with a lot less.

Maybe my eyes adjusted cause I just checked my tank again and can't see any disco effect from the Mitras. Maybe your tank is too small, have you tried switching that out yet?

And where are you getting all these fixtures from? I think Dave might need better security :surprise:

:lol: I was just thinking the same thing!

I haven't been doing as much lurking on the forum this summer/fall as usual so I totally didn't know you had a tank crash this summer! Looks like 2012 was a rough year for alot of us. Sorry to hear about the total loss but going by the last few pages of this thread, you can see why I didn't notice.

I'm quite envious of you guys in Calgary. It would take me years to collect that many awesome frags and colonies and you've repopulated your tank with a plethora of pure amazingness in just a few short months.

Thanks as well for the reviews on the radion, kessil and mitras. From what I've read online, it seems like the Mitras is definately a step up from all of the other modular LED fixtures currently on the market.

I can only guess you may be "borrowing" a Radion pro once they hit the shelves?

Corals are all looking great BTW.

Maybe you are just one of the lucky ones who are not as suceptable to the disco effect. The Mitras do a good job of reducing it with a tighter array unlike the Radions. Mind you, even with Radions there are those who don't notice disco with them. And of course there is also the possibility that you would just simply get used to it :-)

It kind of reminds me if the early days of DLP Projectors. Are you familiar with those? They have a spinning colour wheel. The first and second gen DLP projectors had horribly slow spins on their colour wheel and some people noticed colour banding as a result. Not everyone noticed it but a lot of people did. Then they sped up the colour wheel and gradually reduced the effect. Fewer and fewer people could pick up the colour banding (ie rainbow effect). I have a 4th gen DLP projector in my home theatre with a 6x speed colour wheel and I can still occasionally see the rainbow effect but rarely any of my guests do.

Thanks! I do consider myself lucky to be living in Calgary. We have lots of cool **** :-). I don't even mind the traffic. I used to live in Toronto so I know how bad it could be.

dude, you don't really know Calgary traffic because your work is like 2 minutes drive from your home so shut the ***** up!!!!! :-D

Yes, you are right Tai. I have a very easy 5 min commute to work with virtually no traffic. And this is exactly why I don't mind Calgary traffic (from my perspective). I don't really experience what goes on beyond my 5 km radius of work-chinook centre-Deerfoot meadows. So ya, im sure traffic is horrible elsewhere in the city, but i dont live elsehwere. I live where i do because traffic is nice here :-)

Having said that, I am a strong believer of the notion that if there is something you can change, don't bitch about it. Don't like your commute? Move. It's not like there is a shortage of housing in the city. Or wait, did someone force you to live where you live??? :-)

You're going to upset Tony with all this talk. Apparently Calgary traffic is solely designed to annoy him. Maybe he should move?

Not to get onto it too much, but I could write an essay about what is wrong with that. The reality is that the needs of the population are not going to go away and the "solution" as it were, is not to move, but rather should more involve things like that municipalities doing a better job of forward thinking, and thinking outside the box in their policy decisions. I would much prefer to personally take mass transit for a work commute but it isn't a viable option nor will it be for me for possibly another 20 years. Frankly I hope to be not working by then. This morning as I looked around at the cars around me, very very few had more than one occupant. If that doesn't annoy you, great and good for you ... but instead it annoys you that I'm annoyed by it, then frankly that speaks more about you than it does me.

You have a nice tank Kien, very enviable.

I think it's more amusement than annoyance :) Have you thought about riding a bike to work? Might be good for the soul to pass all the cars with one occupant. Might also be cold -lol

1. I totally agree with you that the city should be doing more to improve infrastructure. I am not sure that there are too many Calgarians that will disagree with this.

2. I don't recall saying that I was annoyed at anything? There are a lot of things in this world that are out of our control and we just simply have to live with it. It's not like I have never sat in traffic before. Yes, it's brutal, but it is what it is. Nothing I say or do is really going to change that. Instead, I just take a deep breath, turn on the radio and sing along :-) Or as Brad suggested, I could ride my bike to work. There's a guy on my Runkeeper street team who has been commuting to work on his mountain bike from Country Hills to downtown every day so far this winter.

3. Your tank is nicer than mine. :razz:

Not only was the Mitras brighter, it blew all those SPS colonizes at the bottom of the tank away. Now das awesome. :wink:

Have you decided which unit you want to move over to? Or are you still part of the no LEDs club?

My clowns are just like yours, they never venture away from their cave.

Well, I wouldn't say that I am necessarily NO LEDs. I'm quite open to the idea of switching to LEDs if I could just find one that I liked. This is why I've been trying a bunch out. I still prefer my MH and T5 combo for its over all look. However, if my fixture were to break today and I could not replace it with another one, I would either go with a Kessil 350W and T5 combo or just the Mitras.

Ya, I could probably place my anemone and clowns into a cup of water and they probably wouldn't notice. In fact, they might be happier since they don't really enjoy the company of any of the other fish. Mostly they get annoyed whenever someone swims near their anemone.

Well I used to walk to my old work place but then the company decides to spend our bonus on rent in down town instead. Traffic is actually not too bad for me with my work hours 9:30 to 4:00 but I can understand why ppl is complaining about Calgary traffic.

I love where i live more than trouble i have to deal with commute so not really complaining, just saying you don't know what Calgary traffic is like during rush hours and you said it is not too bad which is kind of wrong statement :-)

Well, I think it's all relative. Calgary traffic is different in different parts of the city. Yes, I realize there are some really bad traffic areas, but there are some decent traffic areas as well. I drive over Deerfoot every day and I can see it backed up for as far as the eye can see, so ya, I can see how the people sitting in those cars would consider Calgary traffic terrible. But for the record, I never said Calgary traffic wasn't that bad. I think I said that I didn't mind the traffic. There's a difference there :-)

I have to agree, my commute in and out of downtown from my house is between 10-45 minutes. With nobody on the road at 6:15am I can make it door to door in 10 minutes with the lights in my favour. If I have to work late and leave at 4pm it takes me 45 minutes to get home soley due to volume.

A trip from my house to any of our LFs is at least 45 minutes from door to door and again its volume more so then anything.

Ya, and sometimes the volume is completely unpredictable. I am surrounded by industrial parks which seems to be quite variable. Sometimes I can fly up and down Glenmore Trail, while other times (at the exact same time of day and on the same day) I could easily be at a stand still on Glenmore and not due to any accidents. Just volume in the area for whatever reason. Also, 18th Street SE which runs right through my community (Riverbend) has now been opened up at both ends with access from Deerfoot in the south. Some days it's all normal and there's a typical amount of flow on 18th Street while other times people appear to be jumping off of the Deerfoot and detouring onto 18th Street which causes grid lock through my community. I've been caught in it a few times but it is what it is.

Kien it would be great to see your tank in person someday. I will chime in on the Deerfoot traffic. I as well drive that road daily from Harvest Hills to Heritage. If I don't leave my house by 7am I'm screwed. If I can leave work early it has to be by 3pm. Otherwise there's no point in leaving before 6pm. It seems like it gets worse every day.

Sometimes I'll wake up and try and get to my office in the basement and one of the cats will be on the stairs. They like to cut you off and dive under your feet so I have to be really careful. This can affect commute times anywhere from 5 - 10 seconds. I need to get down there to work so I've come to accept it.

:lol:

Not sure what's worse, road rage or cat rage ?

http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5148/5...47235c9959.jpg

From what I'm reading I can never live in Calgary. With work I drive from job to job every day. By the end of the day the wife can't talk to me until I've either killed ppl on my Xbox or I've sat in silence for min 30 min. Regina is full of irritating drivers. And I know it's not anywhere near your issues. Or maybe I just need a happy pill lol


Sent from my porcelain aquarium

Have you tried stepping on the cat? This has worked well for me in the past.

Well interestingly enough I've been wanting to try the Mitras over my tank too just to see how they could compare. So far, most LED's on the market are marketed as (or "touted as") replacements for 250w, whereas I run 400w Radiums and 3 of them, so anything that is a "good choice to replace 250w" is a step down. The Mitras are the first that specifically don't limit themselves to the 250w niche.

The challenge though is that I'm not sure you get a really good picture over a longer tank like yours (or mine) with just one unit. Putting two side by side might have some cancelling effects on the colour separation ...then again it might just make it worse ... hard to anticipate! Unfortunately with the price point on these units it is an expensive proposition just to experiment with multiple units. Although given the positive comments from users I would imagine it is only a matter of time before we see larger data sample out there.

They may well be worth the price, but the flip side is that it's not a trivial thing either.

I can speak a little to this. I've had my clowns and their host carpet in several different tank configurations over the years, including both larger communities and smaller dedicated setups. Before they were introduced to the 280g, they lived in a shallow 40g tank that was exclusively their home for the most part. Their behaviour however, was far more cryptic and shy in that tank than they ever were in the bigger tanks. The territory was barely a few inches, whereas now it is still small but not to anywhere near the same extreme. I am not certain if it was the tank size or shape (or confines of the smaller tank) or if it's the community/dithering effect of other fish to draw them out and force them to be a tiny bit more social.



Feel I have spoken too much about this already but FWIW, yes I do ride a bike in the summer and interestingly it tends to make me a lot happier person overall. The problem is, unfortunately, .. me. Anything colder than about 8c and I just can't handle the chill. (If anything my tolerance for cold has gotten worse over the years.) And anything colder than 8c can start anywhere as early as September and last anywhere up to all the way to June (it's highly variable though year to year).


That is very kind of you to say, but it is simply not true. :razz:

I totally get where you're coming from. I used to love going outside in the snow when I was younger, and it didn't bother me one bit. Now, every single year it gets worse and worse. To the point where now I'm grunting when its chilly outside during the spring or fall lol.

Non-Traffic, Non-Light Related Stuffs.
 

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http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8501/8...3d149870_o.jpg

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Man, you have some crazy photography skills!! Those shots are killer!!

Also finally got around to paying another one of my all time favourite vendors a visit this past weekend. Just some of the loot that I came away with from Coral Master himself :biggrin:

http://i1002.photobucket.com/albums/...78F4E8B078.jpg

http://i1002.photobucket.com/albums/...78EDA7AA63.jpg

There is a reason why we call him the Coral Master..

So much for my Christmas budget. Kids are getting frag plugs to play with. :lol:

thanks! :-D

Nice haul man! Greg's tanks are full of sweet stuff.

Nice stuff K-dawg! :mrgreen:

I am hoping my new lights allow me to join in some of the snappy club very nice haul indeed


Sent from my porcelain aquarium

where did you score the purple deaths? I can't seem to make mine happy they're dwindling away while every single other piece of coral looks great. Mine has a sponge growing on the plug that is wrapped around most of the polyps. wonder if it's an issue?

I got those from fishy time a couple of years ago as a thank you for coral sitting for him during his first tank move. They have survived two coral crashes over the past two years and were flipped over for a couple of months his summer before I noticed. They once completely browned out. They survived my queen angel which pretty much destroyed my zoa collection. Now they seem to be happy as can be. Tough little buggers.

Kien I have been meaning to message you to follow up to make sure the frags are doing ok. After seeing your post I will assume they are still alive & healthy. Thanks for stopping by for a visit. :biggrin:
Funny coincidence I haven't seen my dragon pipes for days, did one end up in one of your frag bags?:lol:

I saw one of your dragon pipes while I was there. No Brett, not *that* pipe, pervert!

Frags are doing awesome! :-)

How do you find it keeping a Dragon Pipe in a large tank? Do you have to spot feed him (or her) at feeding time? Do any of his (or her) larger tank mates harass him (or her).