Lyco is delighted to announce the arrival of Soraa, the latest lighting brand to be added to our ever-growing range of LED lighting.

Hailing from California, Soraa is an innovative company that began producing high quality LED lighting in 2013. Brainchild of Nobel Prize Winner, Shuji Nakamura (dubbed the ‘father of modern LED lighting’), Soraa’s lighting solutions leverage science to produce a quality of light that is comparable to natural daylight.

Soraa prides itself on offering LED lamps that provide unprecedented colour performance and beam control in smaller, brighter, and more efficient ways than other bulbs. Soraa LEDs deliver a crisp, efficient beam, with quality distribution and glare control.

Colours are rendered much more vibrantly with Soraa compared to other artificial light sources because its spectrum offering is complete, matching or even exceeding the natural spectrum of daylight, but without any of the harmful ultraviolet radiation and continuous variations that come with natural light sources.

What makes Soraa unlike other LED bulbs?

Colour rendering

Soraa Vivid lamps offer a color rendering index (CRI) of 95 and R9 (deep red rendering) of 95, providing exceptional light emission in parts of the light spectrum that are missing from many first generation, Low CRI LEDs. Many features in our environment, such as faces, food, fabrics, and furnishings, contain complex hues of colour that don’t look quite right unless they are lit with spectrum light containing these essential colours.

Whites

Many conventional LEDs have slightly blue tinge, and as such, are not always able to render white materials completely accurately. As a result, white materials can look off-white or yellow under incandescent and conventional LED lamps, even those with a high CRI. Soraa has engineered its bulbs to render white materials with optical brightness using violet light, rather than harmful ultraviolet light, delivering a bright, white appearance that is optimal for illuminating fabrics, clothing, cosmetics, paper products, and appliances.

Energy efficiency

In addition to their high quality light output, Soraa bulbs make use of modern LED technology, making them an energy efficient choice when compared with traditional incandescent bulbs. Switching to Soraa LED bulbs can therefore lead to significant cost savings over time.

Hassle free dimming

Soraa LED lamps are designed to dim reliably and smoothly and have been tested with a wide variety of leading brand fixtures, dimmers and transformers to ensure full compatibility with most commercial lighting systems.

Minimal spill and crisp shadows

The three core components of directional lighting are the beam, the field, and the spill. Beam and field are considered as genuinely useful lumens while any lumens that fall outside of this quota are referred to as “spill.” Many traditional light sources, particularly halogens, project a significant amount of spill, meaning much of the energy consumed by the bulb is wasted.

Many modern LED designs incorporate accessories such as recessed trims and lenses which help to eliminate this spill. Soraa’s technology takes this a step further by delivering a circular beam, which results in minimal spill, soft transitions, and high centre-to-edge colour consistency.

How Soraa can work for your business

Lighting for museums and art galleries

The vivid colour, white light rendering, and directional beam with crisp shadowing provided by Soraa makes for an ideal light solution in settings where accurate definition is needed, such as illuminating artworks and artifacts in museums and galleries.

Lighting for hospitality

It’s no secret that poor lighting can have an adverse effect on customer experience within the hospitality industry – last year we conducted a survey that revealed nine out of ten consumers would be put off revisiting a bar, restaurant or hotel if the lighting was bad.

Soraa lamps can help alleviate this problem by offering complete control of beam, brightness, colour, and intensity, making it possible for business owners to showcase their venues in the very best light.

Lighting for retail and fashion

Directional display lighting and accurate colour rendering is an essential part of showcasing retail merchandise. The sale of products such as cosmetics, clothing, furnishings, and paints, for example, depend largely on customers’ ability to distinguish fine gradations in colour, which is only truly possible with perfect full spectrum lighting. Other products with optical brighteners, such as paper, appliances, and electronics also depend on perfect spectrum light to bring out their whiteness. Soraa is an ideal lighting solution in retail settings because its beam accurately renders colours and provides crisp shadowing, ideal for providing a clean and inviting display in and around retail environments.

Charles Barnett Managing Director

Charles started Lyco in 1995 with just 4 enthusiastic employees and has grown it considerably over the past 25 years. Charles is also the Managing Director of Lighting Direct and newly acquired Online Lighting. He now has a team of 50 lighting experts working on growing Lyco Group to be the UK leader in lighting for both businesses and homes. Away from the office he is a keen cyclist and is proud to have cycled 1017 miles from Lands End to John O’Groats to raise money for a new residential centre for adults with multiple learning difficulties.