While we wait to see how well the lights perform based on your journal of this grow and actual plant response perhaps you can provide us;
uMole readings at various points from the canopy facing the lights.
Mfg warranty and where are they actually manufactured and repaired under that warranty.
Price for the two panels and controller
What third party certification do they have and what is the file number?[/QUOTE]
I will see if I can get those answers for you, as well as everyone.
These are the benefits I see from the controller:
It actually isn't a RBG controller, there is no green diodes in the light. The light does cover all spectrums between 380nm-760, with no gaps, *due to 3 different color temp white chips in the units, this covers all visible spectrums in the PAR range, so I don't see how it is not a full spectrum light, when it covers all parts of the PAR spectrum and even beyond to the McCree curve and action spectrum. The only possible "gap" that I see would be around 490nm due to this being the achilles heal of most white led emmitters in this range (including cree xlamps which dip around 490nm) The only other "gap" that I can possibly see is around 700nm but it is not completely a gap since this area does receive coverage.
I actually think you are looking at the controller option 1 way... first off, LED's are used for many other plants than cannabis, yes cannabis definitely is the market that most LED manufacturers make their money and all, but not all plants are plants that require 700umol of light to produce. By giving plants more umol than their saturation point can handle then you are actually hindering photosynthetic response. The ability to dim these panels gives flexibility to growers using them for other purposes.
These are the spectroradiometer readings on the generation 1 lights...the generation 2 lights actually feature a better blue end profile as well as the white diodes were changed on gen 2 models so in a few weeks they will be doing new tests with a spectroradimeter to get the new readings.
Also, im not sure if your aware or not, but plants go through a mid day depression where photosynthetic rates decreses and slow down at mid day, this is the plants response to the "sun" being at high noon where more UV is hitting the surface of the earths surface due to less filtering in the atmosphere. So by ramping up the intensity slowly instead of giving full intensity all day, this has the possibility of increasing photosynthetive effectiveness throughtout the day, eliminating the mid day depression plants go through.
Studies have acutally shown on young plants, the best photosynthetic response was in medium levels of irradiance, where as too low or too high of Umol readings showed plant stress responses in photosystem II hindering growth.
Another controller benefit that I see is that through manipulating the color channels you can manipulate plant growth through their photoproteins and photo morphogenesis. We all know that all strains have different growth traits....OG Kush is normally very lanky, long internodes and such, vs a bubba kush, snort stubby plant with tight internodes. So what if you are growing the bubba, and you want it to be more spread out and stretchy... with the Igro lights, you can slowly dim down the blue to induce more stretchy growth. And Vice versa, you can add more blue and limit red if your plants are stretching too much... cant do this with any other panels...your stuck with the spectral output soldered in the panels.
Plants also have been shown that in different light irradiances they produce different chemical profiles in plants, matter of fact, it is show that plants grown in shaded environments can actually show higher oil productions than ones grown in direct sunlight, and with cannabis, isn't essential oils one of the things we go for in heavy production?
Lastly, the lights do not have to be used with the controller and can be run at just 100% full intensity all the time.. so with this being said, when comparing panels in the price/wattage categories, the Igro lights are actually slightly cheaper than Advanced LED, Lush, Blackdog and many other brands, hosting same features. So if you didn't see use for the controller, then you could just use it at 100% intensity and still get a better price than buying a different panel with the same features (on/off).
I do agree with you that photosynthesis is a direct relation with light irradiance levels, CO2 availability and temperature and that typically the more light, the higher the photosynthetic rate assuming CO2 and temperature are in correlation with the plants requirements. But I also see that studies show plant fatigue in extreme high irradiance levels, I think that there is more use to a dimmable controller that we know what to do with at this time.
I know that new concepts can be uncomfortable as people get familiar with what works, but step outside your familiarities and you will see that there is many potential uses for a controllable dimming light, that other fixed intensity and spectrum lights cant do...
Hope this helped man.
