> On Aug 30, 2019, at 9:54 AM, Nicholas Stock <[email protected]> wrote: > > There are a few colours that work well. Orange can look good, yellow not so > much as it washes out nixie filaments. I tried blue once and it was awful. I > think I will try purple next but need to get the mix right. The first attempt > there was way too opaque and I couldn’t see the digits!
Because they use incandescent tungsten filaments Numitrons emit continuous spectrum blackbody radiation instead of the much more discrete wavelengths of a phosphor, LED or ionized gas. They have a relatively low color temperature, probably similar to small Christmas lights. When using colored filters the brightness and perceived color varies enormously as there is lots of yellow, almost as much orange, less green (and red), and a small amount of blue. Violet is almost nil. "Purple" would actually be magenta, a mix of blue and red. Take a look at this chart: Notice that there's more red than orange and yellow yet red looks much dimmer. This is because the human eye's sensitivity drops off rapidly as the wavelength increases towards infrared. The same is true of the blue end but there's not that much blue to begin with. A friend of mine bought some lights with purplish paint on them and of course when she plugged them in they turned pink because there was much more red than blue. I have one set of lights in my collection that are true violet. You have to be in a dark room to even see them but by golly... I collect old Xmas lights and custom paint my own modern strings to get unique colors so I'm very familiar with this situation. My bubble light tree has seven strings of 50 hand painted turquoise lights on it. The unlit color is more aqua. The tree itself is only about three feet tall and in diameter. A "full size" tree would require at least a couple thousand bulbs to get the same effect. Terry Bowman, KA4HJH "The Mac Doctor" "If only you could see what I've seen with your eyes."—Roy Batty, Blade Runner -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "neonixie-l" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/neonixie-l/711F3D4B-C661-4018-9558-49D33CECC56C%40gmail.com.
