[mike31154]

Large companies/corporations do not always have the market cornered with respect to innovation & engineering expertise. It appears to me that Orphek has done at least several years of research into their product & from some of the reviews of actual users, the product is very good. After reading the information in the link to 3reef, I'm inclined to believe that a fair bit of effort & useful research has gone into their fixtures. The fact that they do not use Crees or even Bridgelux (which many have scoffed at until recently) may turn some people off, but there is more & more data appearing that shows there are other manufacturers out there producing diodes more than suited to our application. Bottom line appears to be that at the very least they've done extensive research into the colour spectrum required by our livestock & tailored their fixtures to that end.

It's irrelevant where their storefront may have been a year ago. To the best of my knowledge their head office is currently in Brazil, one of the strongest emerging market economies. We need to be careful of our foreign country bashing, particularly China. They have some very intelligent folks over there, just like any country in the world, many of them educated in some of our finest universities. I figure in a decade or two, our complacency & sense of entitlement with our still comfortable standard of living is in for a wake up call from emerging market countries like Brazil, China etc.