EISCO Premium Quantitative Spectroscope - 400-700nm Range, 5nm Accuracy - for Studying Light Sources, Measuring Wavelengths & Color Spectra...

Worth the $10 to experiment and see what various lights look like. I dont know why the directions specifically tell you to use a fluorescent light, but as you can see from the photos its the only one that looks different from the other lights, as it has distinct spectral bands due to atomic emissions, instead of the broad spectrum all the other lights share. The full spectrum grow lights (second photo) seem very similar to the rest of my lightsdaylight, random led, random incandescent. Theres lots of photo variability due to me trying to hold my phone and the spectroscope up to the light to take the photo in midair.

Not great, hard to read the wavelength, but I didn't expect much for $10. It is basically a diffraction grating, a scale, a slit, and plastic to hold them. It _can_ show if an LED or fluorescent light source has gaps in its spectrum. I was hoping to see where the absorbtions were in some colored solutions, and that is too hard to read. Oh well.

This is not worth it, I didn't expect much having read reviews, needing to be modified and so on, however I found out why people use their cameras to see inside the device as the images of scale and numbers are illegible. I only wanted it to experience seeing the light spectrum and having that shown on a readable scale. It is junk, toy, garbage as most said, that is unless you are going to improve it by taking apart and only using a camera to read the scale.

To start, this is not a professional spectrophotometer or even spectrometer. (Did you expect one at this price?) It is a spectroscope, a lightweight device you can look through and see the colors emitted by an object. I turned it on a Soraa LED lamp (image above); Soraa makes the best such lamps. Most inexpensive LED lamps will have a bright emission line somewhere near 450 nm (4.5 on the scale shown), then a broad emission spectrum (the conversion phosphor) from around 580-650 nm. This has five visible lines: 435 nm (the wavelength of the driving LED), 485 nm (cyan), 535 nm (green), 575 nm (yellow), and 600 nm (red). These numbers came from reading the spectroscope. Being an optical scientist, I was sure these were inaccurate, since I had thought Soraa's green phosphor was at 550 nm. It turns out the spectroscope was right. This is actually the second of these spectroscopes I have purchased. I thought I had broken my previous one, because if I looked at the LED light in my office with the spectroscope, I didn't see anything near the scale, but did see a spectrum off to the side. The side spectrum is always there, and should duplicate the spectrum by the scale. I couldn't see the spectrum from my lamp because the driving LED is at 405 nm (my glasses have a 405-nm blocking additive for this reason) and the broad phosphor spectrum is too dim. When I look at my monitor screen with the spectroscope I see three phosphor emissions, as I should; when I look at sunlight reflected from a white paper (NEVER look directly at the sun or at a laser with--or without--the spectroscope) there is a continuous spectrum. Overall, this is somewhat more than an educational toy, but definitely less than a professional instrument. At the price of $10-$15, though, you can't really go wrong. And, as it turns out, the accuracy is far better than I had thought.

So impressed with this for the price. Durable, simple, useful. The frequency numbers are very hard to read, but I just go by the color anyway. Just look in the hole on the small end, aim the slit at the light source, and see the spectrum to the side .