Would you say it's a big of a stretch for chinese claims that they are Sammy diodes when in fact the die package is not even the same form factor? It seems if you looked at 25 random amz listings for the "cheap (cough) quality lights" everyone's looking for - there's no shortage of 2835 packages shown claiming to be Samsung 301x, and sure they make diodes in that FF but they are NOT 301's and if they say they're 561c I doubt they're actually Sammy even if there's better choices in that package size.
So many people only look at the price and cry because they're going to buy AT LEAST TWICE!
@Prawn Connery
What are your thoughts on mixing equal amounts of 5000 & 2700k strips?
I'm just thinking out loud and was tossing around just red supplements and thought maybe....
I think
@Rocket Soul and
@grotbags covered this well.
One of the reasons I really like the Nichia 2700 CRI90 chips is because of all the far red they have. Credit where it's due, HLG brought out a QB324 about 5-6 years ago that featured a mix of Nichia 3000K CRI80 and CRI90 diodes which I bought and put together to make a couple of 400W fixtures for a freind who wanted to compare them against his 600W HPS grow. I was so impressed with the Nichia boards that I went to buy more . . . but HLG had sold out. So I decided to design and make my own boards with the same diodes. Except this time I used Nichia CRI90 2700K and Optisolis 3000K CRI98.
I made two versions of these board: one with Seoul Semiconductor "Sunlike" 5700K diodes with 415nm pumps for the added violet/UVA, and one with just the Nichias I called a "High Red" board due to the red and far red component.
Here is the Sunlike board – the original "High Light"
And here is the High Red board. Both have around 5% far red
They grew well. The High Light was a standalone LED panel while the High Red was designed to be mixed with CMH.
But I digress . . . If you already have the 5000K strips (or whatever) then yes, add 2700K to them. What a lot of people don't understand is that 2700K will flower AND veg faster than 5000K. The only reason anyone suggests 5000K for veg is to keep plants more compact, but you can do that by adding violet/UVA at one end of the spectrum and having more red and far red at the other. Sunlight is 25% far red but you don't see plants stretch under it because there is also a lot of blue and – more importantly – UV (A and B) to provide cell contraction. By fillingout the spectrum at the violet/UV end, you can run a very low CCT light with lots more red and far red to boost growth and flowering while keeping plants compact.
The moral of the story is, what high CRI diodes lack in efficiency, they make up for with added red and far red with a nicer, broader spectrum tat plants respond to.
Here are the plants that were grown under thr 400W QB324 fixtures I made back in 2018. There were two of them that yielded 22oz and 24oz each.
