I recently took the plunge and upgraded my current spectrometer which was a wide angle fixed focus spectrometer which worked great, but required a bit of setup and the use of a black adjustable slit which you would place in front of the unit for light source control. In doing some research, I found this little gem called the Kvant Spectra-1. It's made by a Kvant which is located in Switzerland and they manufacture many lasers and optical products for professional and educational use. Many universities world-wide have there products and they appear to be a reputable company.
The Spectra-1 is a bit pricy but the functionality is far better than my old one. The unit comes housed in a durable aluminium shell. One side has a USB cable attachment and the other a fiber optic connection which I believe is an SMA type (I may be incorrect on this, I need to look it up). There is a detachable fiber optic cable which connects to a lens pickup attachment which is very directional. This is exactly what I was looking for because it has the resolution and directionality that my old unit did not. The Spectra-1 offers wide range wavelength functionality, it operated between 360nm to 940nm which covers a decent amount of UV and IR. The sensitivity and accuracy are fantastic for the price and the software is pretty decent. The realtime update speeds are impressive with updates being able to capture small transient spikes. The unit comes with the spectrometer, fiber optic cable, USB cable (Attached to Housing), Software, Lens Adapter to capture light and focus it into the fiber optic cable and a nice hard carry/storage case.
I am going to try and do a quick video review if I have time and get into some more detail and show a few test setups and experiments.
Edit: The updated software adds a few new features and changes the IR area to a darker gradient instead of just black. I will add some new screenshots when I get a chance. The Black area seen in the Halogen bulb is all in the NIR and up range.
Attached are some photos. The two graphs are as follows:
A) GE Halogen 60W bulb measured at 6 feet.
B) Gallium Blue LED measured at 1 inch.
C) Marketing Graph of Gallium Blue LED to show comparison
D) Photo of the unit, marketing image.
They offer a few variations of this spectrometer as follows:
21-2301 Spectra 1
Spectral range: 360 - 940 nm
Spectrometer resolution: <1,5 nm FWHM
Pixel resolution: < 0,5nm
21-2305 Spectra UV-VIS
Spectral range: 360 - 650 nm
Spectrometer resolution: <0,8 nm FWHM
Pixel resolution: <0,33 nm
21-2306 Spectra NIR
Spectral range: 650 - 940 nm
Spectrometer resolution: <0,8 nm FWHM
Pixel resolution: <0,33 nm
21-2307 Spectra CNFG
Customers configuration
Spectral range and resolution is user selectable in
interval of 360- 940 nm
I went with the wide-band Spectra-1 model although the narrow band models have a little better resolution, it was a minor trade-off to get the bandwidth I needed.
