The Utopya is a new LED light from Italian product manufacturer Xaqua. Based in Italy, Xaqua first grabbed attention of reef aquarists with their innovative Xinout water drain and return device which automatically creates small waves in the aquarium.
Xaqua is again trying to do something different in the marine aquarium hobby with a very unorthodox choice of LEDs in their Utopya LED aquarium fixture. The Utopya is a pretty straightforward housing, with a large passively cooled heatsink backing up a panel of raw LEDs.
The Utopya LED has a total power level of 150 watts, with no secondary lenses to provide a nice even light field over a 80 x 60 cm area. What is most striking about the Utopya is that it has no conventional blue LEDs, using a strong punch in the near UV spectrum with 50 watts of 420nm LEDs. The Utopya LED uses just three colors of LEDs, cool white, amber and 420nm Indigo and these are each on controllable channels.
The use of redder colored warm-white LEDs is a great way to bring out the warmer pink, purple and orange colors but without real blue 450 or 470nm LEDs, it would seem like this light would be somewhat lacking in the blue spectrum. But somehow the combination that Xaqua kind of works and it makes live corals look like they are being lit by fluorescent T5 lighting.
The Xaqua Utopya LED light costs €798 which with the dollar currently being strong, exchanges to a very reasonable $872. But if you want to tap into the wireless control capability you need to pony up for the wi-fi module which costs an additional €119 ($130). We’re very curious to see how Xaqua’s particular choice of LEDs and resulting color spectrum grows and colors up corals in an aquarium. There’s definitely some neat aspects of the Utopya LED which have us interested in trying one out but we’ll reserve our final judgment for when we see long term results in real world conditions. [XAQUA]
