Richard Krush wrote:

Thank you for the information! Right now I'm in the process of testing how my
plants will grow with two Philips F32T8 TL850 (5000K color temperature and 86
CRI). I'm also intrigued by two other Philips bulbs, but local hardware
stores didn't seem to have those. One is TL865, which has color temperature
of 6500K and CRI of 86 and the second one is TL950 with 5000K c.t. and CRI of
_98_! The latter especially sounds very promising.

I have 80G tank with four TL950 36W bulbs for half a year or so. Everything
seems right, plants grow well and fishes are healthy. High CRI and 5000K color
temp. make your tank very natural looking also and I like these bulbs because
of it even better. There's one downside, thought, such high CRI bulbs are
usually less efficient than their low-CRI counterparts. The 36W TL(D)950 has
~2300lm output, 36W TL(D)840 (cool white) has ~3000lm. Hagen Sun-GLO 36W bulb
has ~3000lm output and is very noticeably brighter than TL(D)950, so that's
what you get for extra money. Sun-GLO is over 2x higher priced here than
TL(D)950, so I went with latter.

Hope this helps
--

Vallo Kallaste