[Canadian]

Originally Posted by StirCrazy

color is very tricky.. there is real color which you get under very intense lighting and low nutrients and there is fake color, which you get by mixing different color t5's

what I am getting at is if you take a color with true color out of the tank away from blue lights the coral is not brownish... it is the color you see in the tank. an example was my old tri colored blue milli.. it was purple, blue and light blue.. when I moved and we were unpacking it it looked the same in the air as it did under 10K lights.

Fake color (which you can get under any lighting just couldn't resist the dig at t5's ) is when you have a coral that is a beautiful blue and then you pull it out and it is brownish with maybe a hint of blue.. fake colors are a reflectance color where the coral adsorbs light and reflects it out as a different or similar color. different types of coral will flores with different colors depending on the pigmentation they have developed and a few other factors. so you could shine a 14K bulb on 6 corals that look brown in the sunlight but one might floress green another few blue, one red ect... most T5 set up are using combos of different bulbs to maximize this effect which I call fake color. also anyone who uses heavy blue MH lights is using this also.

the tanks look nice but I personally like a tank of true color and accordingly use a 10K light with just a hint of actinic to give me a icy white look instead of blue.. but to be successful with this type of tank you need to find nicer specimen corals and be very picky with water quality/lighting/water flow ect..



Steve

Steve, I know you're partially jesting with the comments on T5s but thought I would post a link to some pics of corals grown under T5s but photographed (at the end of the document) out of the water and no longer under T5s to show that the color is "true" to some extent especially as it relates to purple pigments:

http://archiv.korallenriff.de/Lichttest/T5-1.pdf