The QuarionZ is a new metal halide pendant from Damsel Lighting which hopes to make people consider metal halide lighting for their reef tanks. With a super sleek paint job, futuristic look, and a radical design departure, the QuarionZ definitely has our attention, but is it enough for us to kiss and make up with HID lighting?
LED lighting with all its perks of programming, multicolor spectrum and multichannel control have all but taken over lighting for small and large tanks alike, and don’t forget the significant reduction in heat and energy consumption. But for the diehard, pedal-to-the-metal SPS coral keepers, there’s still no replacement for the intensity and full spectrum of metal halides.
Especially when it comes to growth, metal halides are still the preferred lighting technology for getting the best growth and shape from light-demanding, shallow water corals. LEDs can surely keep SPS alive, grow them and especially color them up like nobody’s business. But if you want your Acropora millepora to really look like a MILLI, we know we can rely on high intensity discharge from metal halide lights.
So what’s so special about the QuarionZ that would make some reefers consider halides again? The short answer is, we don’t really know yet. Damsel Lighting has been especially coy with the teaser campaign, so far only revealing the general appearance of the QuarionZ pendant which is designed to house double-ended 150 watt halide bulbs, remember those?
The futuristic designed QuarionZ costs a cool $329 for the basic matte silver finish, $349 for the matte black, and there’s even a limited edition shiny ‘Blasto Red’ model which costs $389. Those prices are for the pendant alone, so you’ll have to source your own ballast and halide bulb. One part of the intro video shows two 150w halide lamps lighting up side, perhaps this is another part of the QuarionZ’s unique lighting design, but then you’re also talking double the ballasts and double the bulbs.
For that kind of coin, we sure hope for Damsel Lighting that the QuarionZ has some exceptional tricks up it’s heat-shield sleeve, or that the market in Japan is especially more receptive to metal halide lighting than the U.S. and EU. Here is the latest teaser video from the fledgling new lighting company which has promised us more information about the reflector side of the QuarionZ sometime in early January. [QuarionZ]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOvPxO5Epjg
