I've heard people say the AI Primes "disco ball" and reflect differently off the water and in photos. Is this what you mean by color fringing?
Yeah exactly. Apologies if remainder of this post is an egg-sucking tutorial; I went for completeness rather than assuming you know what I've only just found out:
When you see that nice shimmer on the sand bed, you see constantly moving brighter and darker patches of white/blue a bit like the sun on the sea bed if you go snorkeling in shallow water. With the Kessils, there's no separate colors visible. With other lights, you'll see the same thing, but you'll be able to make out different colors (whatever the LEDs are, red and green for example) as well as the nice blue/white sun-looking color. I think (again, it's personal) it looks artificial and migraine-y. Not what I want from my relaxing reef!
All LED aquarium lights make quite a busy shimmer, because, like the sun, they're "point sources" unlike say T5s. Metal Halide bulbs do this too, and it's gorgeous to look at (personal taste again!) LEDs are trying to get close to the Metal Halide effect. Now imagine that, but imagine you can see colors too. Again some people care, some don't. I wish I didn't because in every other way the Primes were perfect for me (price, size, coverage, controllability, look).
But check these vids out.
Here's a vid of some Kessils:
And here's the Primes:
(
But note this is from a company making a diffuser for the Prime to improve the shimmer, so it's in their interest to make the "before" look as bad as possible.)
If you hate the shimmer entirely, then get T5s or a heavily diffused LED. I like it so didn't research that too much.
