Sorry buddy, I've not been able to be on the forums much lately. In terms of the Radions (I will update my thread at some point and give my review/experience of the Radions):
In terms of overall SPS; the radions do come close to my T5/LED hybrid units. For a mixed reef, I think LED's are just fine.
In terms of light coverage, you need lots of units to get same coverage as T5.
My tank is practically 95% SPS and 90% of that is acropora. Hence I have noticed subtle changes in some of my acros that I'm not happy about.
What I wasnt happy about was for example, my Red Planet: its no way as red as before. It didnt brown out...rather it looks like a purplely red planet. Maybe its a spectrum thing I dont know. The frag I gave to my buddy turned the same kind of colour in his tank. Its like a kind of purple red rather than the more red tone I had under T5's.
The other coral with significant change is my "rainbow" granulosa...it had a green base, changing to a sky blue towards the tips with a purple tip face. Its turned largely green. Lost the sky blue colour completely. I'd adjust the spectrum and measured the PAR levels but couldnt get the sky blue colour back.
Another acro with pink corallite edges and red polyps lost the red polyps and the pink corallites.
So as I said earlier in the post; for a mixed reef or a reefkeeper who is going new into the hobby and or newly with SPS isnt going to notice these subtle differences...and they will rightly say, yeah sure LEDs/Radions are fine for acros...and they are...but IMO they dont pull that extra bit of colour and some acros dont look as nice. They could be coloured nicely, but for me acros that had more than two or more colours have morphed into single or double colours.
Now I am being very critical here, but keeping a tank full of acros I can notice the changes.
The other thing I didnt like was how dim the Radions look...I couldnt get used to the dimmer look...they look dim, but the PAR is there. If I turned them up to how bright my corals looked under my T5's, the PAR levels went up crazy...
...Which tells me the light is VERY directional and pointing largely down. There isnt as much scatter as there is with T5's or MH in a reflector.
What confirmed my above observation was the top facing tissue have nice colour, but the sides and anything in shadow has turned pale. With my T5's I didnt have this issue.
I think had I went with a couple of Radions and T5 as supplemental, I wouldnt be changing anything right now....
But since I decided to change up again, I came across a used Giesemann 400w in very good condition and decided to snap it up. I didnt even haggle with the price, I just offered the asking price-which wasnt cheap considering how cheap most halide setups go for these days...but being able to run 400w Radium and T5 and possibly LED's if I carry out a mod...I couldnt resist.
