The Radion G4 LED is being announced today in three variants, the Radion XR30w, the XR30w Pro, and the single-cluster XR15w Pro. Having taken more than two years to come out with a successor to their flagship light, Ecotech Marine has had a lot of time to execute the best LED light that they’ve ever made.
The long interval since the release of the last Radion LED light has afforded Ecotech the time to allocate incredible resource of design, engineering and manufacturing. The Radion G4 LED is the culmination of a tremendous effort which results in a new high performance LED aquarium fixture that is head and shoulders above the competition.
Needless to say, the new Radion G4 LED has more LEDs, more colors, more channels, and even more light than ever before. The base model of the fourth generation Radion XR30w has 6 channels of color control, with 150 watts of power spread across 34 LEDs and two clusters, getting mighty close to the specifications of the previous Radion G3 Pro LED.
However the Radion G4 Pro LED ups the ante with even more power, 190 watts spread across 46 LEDs. The new Pro version of the Radion G4 adds two more colors, a new exclusive 430nm Violet and a Warm White LED, both on their own control channels for a total of 8 color control channels. The Radion XR15w Pro Gen 4 has all the same features but only a single cluster for 95 watts of light power.
The previous arrangement of LEDs and Power in the Radion G3 created quite a hotspot using convention Total Internal Reflection lenses so with even more power, Ecotech Marine decided to completely overhaul their light delivery system. As we’ve already covered, one of the hallmark features of the Radion G4 is the introduction of ‘Hemispherical Edge Illumination’ lenses which give a much better and even spread of light intensity, with virtually no hot spot.
Interestingly, the use of these new HEI lenses results in much more uniform light output throughout the tank, but lower peak PAR values in the aquarium. Another very creative solution to blending all these LED colors which could be easy to overlooked is that similarly colored LEDs are grouped together in the lens cluster of the Radion G4 LED – so all the blues and UV LEDs are placed close together and so are the warm colors like red, white and warm white.
The housing of the Radion G4 LED is virtually identical to existing Radion lights and will therefore be compatible with all of Ecotech Marine’s accessories including the X-brackets and Radion Mounting System, and it will be fully controllable with EcoSmart Live. However, while the Radion G4 is superficially identical to previous Radions, the internals of the LED light have been completely reworked.
The heatsink, motherboard, drivers, LEDs and especially the lenses are completely overhauled from the previous generation Radions and therefore you will not be able to upgrade to the fourth generation Radion. It is always a plus for aquarium companies to engineer their LED lights for backwards compatibility and we’ve been lucky to enjoy this for second and third generation Radion LED lights.
However, a radical redesign in the Radion G4 has precluded any upgrade path from older Radions so if you want the latest and greatest LED light from Ecotech Marine you’ll have to buy a discreet new light. The base model of the Radion G4 will cost the same $649, while a Radion G4 Pro has gone up in price a little bit to $799 and the Radion XR15w Pro G4 is exactly half the price at $399, shipping this week to distributors and resellers.
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