kien's Ecoxotic Panorama 36 LED Retrofit review

[kien]

Okay, so I recently got one of these fancy schmancy new LED retrofit kits to play around with. Mostly I was curious because I'm quite new to this whole LED scene. I was surprised that to find that there weren't too many reviews on these units. Well, here's my completely unscientific review.

The Box:

Ya, not very exciting. It is a brown box.



In The Box:

It does get a little bit more exciting once you open up the box and if you get one, I highly recommend that you do open the box. Inside you'll find a power unit and the LED retrofit itself.



The LED fixture measures roughly 8" by 9" and is attached to a heat sink. The LEDs are covered with a plastic to help protect it and to help diffuse the light.





As far as build quiality, this thing is pretty solid. No loose parts. It is sealed quite well to prevent moisture from getting in.











But how does it look on the tank??

Right, so the unit is sexy, no doubt about that. Time to throw this bad boy over the tank and see what we get. For comparison sake, here is a full tank shot of my tank with just my centre metal halide on. It is a 250watt Phoenix 14K driven by a Galaxy ballast.

Halide:


LED:


You can immediately see from the photos that it isn't quite as bright as the halide fixture. Both are mounted at exactly the same height, which is roughly 1 foot above the water surface. But what about PAR you ask? Good question!

What About PAR?

Using this handy dandy quantum meter that I borrowed from a very generous canreefer I was able to take some PAR readings.



Again, for comparison sake I took PAR readings with my one halide to compare it with. Below is the breakdown. The tank is 20" tall by the way.


Halide:

Above Water: 301
Just Below Water: 230
Mid Level: 200
Bottom of tank: 163



LED:
Above Water: 173
Just Below Water: 120
Mid Level: 66
Bottom of Tank: 28

Conclusion

As you can clearly see, this unit doesn't quite compare to a 250 watt metal halide. I can't honestly say how it would compare to a 150 or 175 watt halide as I have never run them before but I would hazard a guess that the 150 would perform similar to the LED, maybe? I did lower the unit to about 6" above the water's surface and the PAR did go up a bit. It still didn't come close to the 250watt halide but there was a slight improvement in PAR. Also of note is the fact that the light got much narrower (ie, less spread) once the unit was lowered. To match a 250 halide you would likely need a few of these guys stacked together. It may also be worth mentioning that both the MH and the LED units are roughly the same size, length and width.

I just wanted to mention also that when I first plugged this unit in it looked VERY bright. I think that this is a case of where your eyes can fool you. When I first looked at the LED lit tank I swore that it was throwing out as much light as the Halide. However, once I started taking par readings and compared the pictures it was obvious that my eyes adjusted themselves to viewing both lights equally. The camera on the other hand did no such thing. It was set on manual mode with a fixed aperture, shutter speed and ISO so what the camera's sensor sees is what you're getting out of the light fixture.

Solid fixture. By itself I think it throws out quite a bit of light, especially for its low watt draw. I would not hesitate to stack a few of these together to light a FOWLR, softy or shallow frag tank. For an SPS tank I would be hesitant unless I had A LOT of them.

DISCLAIMER: This was NOT a scientific test! This was a guy with an LED fixture and a PAR meter monkeying around.