One Cubic Meter of Ocean

[FishyFishy!]

DROOOL. I'm totally jealous of your plumbing/sump setup. I hope that mine turns out the least bit as beautiful as yours! lol. Can't wait to see those lights in action!

....Do they actually come with sunglasses??... or am I missing a totally obvious inside joke haha

[xtreme]

Let us know your thoughts on the Mitras. Been thinking about pulling the trigger on a few myself.

[kien]

Wow those Mitras are hot cakes! Steve needs a Mitras meet up at his haus!

[sphelps]

OK, lights are up





Initial thoughts, freaking sweet! That is all

[sphelps]

Seriously though the lights are awesome, if you're thinking about buying them you need to stop thinking and buy them already.

The spread is great, I was limited to a max of 8" (water level to bottom of fixture) mounting space above the tank due to the cabinet above. The three fixtures easily cover every area of the tank which is 62x32. Two lights may even be enough but three seems like the right amount for this tank.

Color blending is flawless, you can't see any disco effect at all, even will all colors active. To make sure my eyes haven't just adjusted to LEDs I used my camera to test, it also had issues with manual WB set with LED tanks, no issues with these fixtures.

Color is awesome, you can't go wrong as you can set to any spectrum you want.

Brightness, they do in fact come with sunglasses.

Software is probably my favorite part, the composer feature is sooooo slick. You can set what seems to be an infinite amount of points and define preset or custom CCTs for different times and brightness levels and each color channel is automatically set accordingly. It's actually quite overwhelming at first yet still very easy to use. It's something you can play with forever but I just don't have the time right now to go to town just yet so I can't say much more but you can easily save your composer settings so I suspect sharing will become pretty popular.

They of course all connect wireless to each other and to the PC with a temporary cable for programming, this procedure was 100% flawless for me.

The fixtures themselves are really nice, you can dim the display to whatever level you want and even have different settings for day and night. The touch key pad is really nice and on board programming is possible but I'd stick with the PC software for most of that. Single Cables are nice and have pretty slick quick connects to the power supplies which I noticed have an IP-67 rating which is nice to see.

So now the bad stuff...
There is absolutely nothing I can find with these lights I don't like or would want to add, pretty much a dream LED fixture.

[sphelps]

A couple other updates in the fish room

The frag tank was replaced with a larger one, plumbing was changed a bit as a result and the two return pumps have been relocated in the overflow box. The upper sump was removed as I'm not feeding a tank on the main floor anymore, considering leaving the plumbing roughed in there encase this changes but it's unlikely. Still a work in progress, Profilux 3 partially hooked up but still lots to due and I still need to build and setup a new ATO for both fresh and saltwater.

[Coralgurl]

Wow this seems to be coming together quickly! The lights look awesome and sound like a great fixture. Nicely done!

[kien]

Originally Posted by sphelps

As for color, I don't think you get better results from LEDs but this tends more to be personal preference. I find that MH's have the potential for a more broad spectrum which gives a better balance for various coral colors. T5s are also really good for coral color for similar reasons and that you can mix and match various bulbs to meet your preference. I find that with only using white and blue LEDs the colors in many corals are not spectacular by any means, you could add other color LEDs for better results but preforming this experimentation isn't as easy as changing a T5 or MH bulbs.

Also pictures can be misleading, I can take a picture of any coral under any light and make it look way better than in person. Cameras can adjust color and light balance much better than our eyes.

Originally Posted by sphelps

Seriously though the lights are awesome, if you're thinking about buying them you need to stop thinking and buy them already.

The spread is great, ...

Color blending is flawless, you can't see any disco effect at all, even will all colors active...
Color is awesome, you can't go wrong as you can set to any spectrum you want.

sorry, I couldn't resist! Excuse me now while I go buy some new LEDs for my tank..

[Ross]

Originally Posted by kien

sorry, I couldn't resist! Excuse me now while I go buy some new LEDs for my tank..

Just like he never left...

[sphelps]

Originally Posted by kien

sorry, I couldn't resist! Excuse me now while I go buy some new LEDs for my tank..

I stand by it, the color from my DIY LEDs sucked at first, it wasn't until I added red, green, blue, yellow, UV and cyan before I was satisfied with the color but then controlling 8 channels on a DIY fixture is a nightmare and then things starting becoming problematic, ie some channels started flickering or stopped working all together. It was a constant project that never ended sucking up money and time. When I first heard about the Mitras it immediately sparked my interest for obvious reasons and with the timing on the new upgrade making the right choice was easy.