The Metis LED light from Pacific Sun is a new high end LED aquarium light which is not only yearning for your hard earned reef bucks, but it is also gunning for the title of brightest LED light. Of course it’s difficult to quantify the overall brightness of any light; on the one hand you have some shady LED light vendors that are being deceptive about real brightness by using narrow optics, stating maximum PAR and overall making a coral-burning blade of light, but the smooth and even PAR distribution of the Metis LED is much more inline with what you’d expect from a decent metal halide lamp and reflector.
It is impressive how wide the berth of PAR is on the Metis LED while using no optics. At 12 inches away each 100 watt of Metis LED peaks at 300 umols belnding smoothly to a wide area getting hit with 200 or more umols. Of course all that brightness in a small package won’t come cheap as PacificSun’s falgship Metis LED costs nearly $1500 per 200 watts, but for that you get controllability, top of the line LEDs in four colors and aggressive active cooling which increases the preformance and longevity of the LEDs. We can’t wait to see what kind of PAR numbers the PacifcSun Metis XM LED light can pull down.
