I don’t post a lot of “gritty details” on the blog, but occasionally I like to share things I had to learn the hard way (i.e., I couldn’t find it with Google) in hopes of helping someone else struggling to find the same answer. This is one of those posts.
The U channels of The Eureka Room are aluminum. We are upgrading the room for safety and I was shopping for new channels. They come in a lot of finishes. To look at the photos on distributor’s website, they all look about the same shade of grey. Reflectivity is not easy to show. Even the “white” options look pretty dull. And many of them looked like they were actually 3D renderings, not photos of real parts.
So I ended up ordering some samples, which of course took some money and time that I’d rather not have spent.
I received three samples: “white”, “brite anodized”(sic), and “satin anodized”.
A photo is worth a thousands words, so here they are.
As you can see, the “brite” is relatively mirror-like but the “satin” blurs the text.
What about when I put next to the Eureka Room’s 14,000 LED’s?
You can see above that the white doesn’t reflect as much light as the others. It looks downright dark, in fact. While it looks nice in the white room with the white lights on in the room (see the top photo in the post), it stands out as dark when the colored lights are on. The other two look generally the same, but If there is text on the front screen I don’t want it to be mirrored, so I’ll go with Satin.
Let’s take a close up look at satin vs brite. You can see that the satin is not as shiny as the brite:
I hope this helps you. Check out The Eureka Room while you’re here!
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