Lighting Martin Howard’s Antique Typewriter Collection
Martin Howard is Canada’s foremost collector and restorer of 19th-century typewriters. His collection, spanning the earliest years of the industry, has been exhibited at the Royal Ontario Museum and featured in the 2016 documentary California Typewriter. When he built a dedicated gallery in his Stratford home to house the full collection, he began searching for a lighting system as precise and adaptable as the machines themselves.
The challenge was scale and variation: a collection of rare machines, each with unique dimensions, materials, and surface details, displayed across custom-built shelving. He installed 156 Lumicrest DIGIT micro-spotlights, magnetically mounted and individually positioned. The DIGIT spotlights highlight details of the intricate geometry that single-source lighting would flatten. Because the luminaires attach magnetically, the lighting can be easily repositioned or extended as the collection changes and grows.
The result is a residential gallery lit to institutional standards. Each typewriter reads as a distinct artifact, shadows are controlled, and the space maintains the warmth appropriate to a comprehensive collection of historic machines.
“museum quality”
“It feels wonderful to have the entire collection on full display for the first time, and in such style at that. The lighting is superb ….the effect is museum quality.”
“[Lumicrest made] the whole process of getting the right lighting so satisfying and enjoyable.”
The DIGIT showcase lighting system consists of discreet, magnetically mounted LED spotlights for showcase and vitrine lighting.
DIGIT is designed for museums, retail displays, hospitality shelving, and any setting where small objects need precise, focused illumination.
Each luminaire trains its narrow beam on the piece in front of it, whether that piece sits in a museum vitrine or on a custom-built shelf in Stratford, Ontario.
To balance the front-focused spotlights, 22 reels of Spectrala Accent series 95 CRI LED strip were mounted above and slightly behind the typewriters on each shelf. At 4.5 watts per metre, the strips provide ambient illumination of the machines and fill light for the rear wall, eliminating any hard shadows cast by the DIGIT spotlights.
Learn more and view the Martin Howard Antique Typewriter Collection at: www.antiquetypewriters.com
Whether you are lighting your own showcase display, an independent gallery, a regional museum, or a world-class institution, Lumicrest provides lighting with the flexibility and precision that art demands. If you’re looking to transform your lighting, we’d love to help.
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Experience True Colours with High CRI Lighting
CRI is a measure of how complete and accurate the colour spectrum is in a beam of white light, and how well colours will be represented when illuminated by that light. The higher the CRI the better.
LED lights typically found in big box stores typically have a CRI of around 80 or sometimes 90.
A CRI above 90 is considered the minimum for use in an application where accurate colour rendering is a required, such as in art galleries, museums or retail apparel displays.
So if it’s important to you that all the colours in your art, furniture, retail displays etc. be vibrant and fully visible, then you want the highest CRI possible … Continue reading
Apturi III: All luminaires in the Apturi III family are beam-adjustable, which means you can adjust them at any time from a 10° spotlight to a 60° wall-wash floodlight. No changing lenses, Apturi III lets you do it with a flick of the wrist.
For lights with a dedicated beam angle such as Modulux, please see the video below for selecting the lens:
When to choose a wide beam lens and when to choose a narrow beam lens? This video helps you understand the differences and make the best choice.
As well, this handy Beam Angle Calculator helps you determine the spread of different beam angles and positions for your light fixtures.
Need to change the lens on a Lumicrest LED light? Watch this short video on how to swap the lenses on Lumicrest LED lights.
Need more help? Contact us at 416.479.0132 or through our contact form and let us know what you’re trying to achieve. We’re glad to help!
The “colour temperature” of any white light indicates the shade of white.
Very Warm White – Warm White – Soft White – Natural Soft White – Natural White – Pure White – Cool White
(actual colour may vary due to screen settings, best to see in-person)
“Warm white” generally means a yellow-ish type of white, and “cool white” means a blue-ish kind of white. Somewhere in between lies “daylight white”, which is pretty much the whitest kind of white. Cool, warm and daylight are pretty imprecise terms though. A more accurate system indicating the tint of the light is called the colour temperature, or Correlated Colour Temperature (CCT).
A standard incandescent lightbulb is rather yellowish at about 2,700K and a normal halogen is slightly “cooler/whiter” in color, about 3,000K.
For interior lighting in homes, especially in the Western world we have grown accustomed to incandescent and halogen lighting, so we have a comfort with the “warm” colours they produce.
In more industrial settings, and for higher intensity lighting ie. “high bay” lighting, higher color temperatures of 4,500 to 5,000K are accepted. Metal Halide lights (HID) have traditionally been employed for this application, but of course LEDs are now available to do this job more efficiently.
Some specialty applications such as jewelery case lighting often use “cool” bluish lights of 6,500K or higher, in order to accentuate the sparkle and clarity of diamonds, silver and jewels.
Integrated Track Heads are mainly 3000K (as it’s the most popular CCT).
2700K is similar to the color of a regular incandescent or halogen light, which looks a little yellow or “warm”. 3000K is a little bit more white, but is still in the “warm” range. 4000K is approaching sunlight colour temperatures, but still a bit on the warm side. …Continue reading