Hi Saood,

Well, I grow most of my plants from seed under fluorescent lights each year. Last year I wanted to do a little experimenting with light, so I needed a light meter of some kind. I didn't want to spend a lot of money on a fancy meter so I just purchased the "Dr.Meter LX1330B" from Amazon. I'll have to say, I'm very pleased with this meter. Frankly, I don't know how they (Focus Corp) can sell it for the price they do. It seems to be very well made and the meter itself comes in a nice protective cover. Certainly good enough for my purpose.

By the way, there's an old post here on GardenWeb about using a digital camera as a light meter (see link below). Before answering your post I decided to give it a try. I measured the light about 18 inches under one of my fluorescent lights with the LX1330B and got 320 foot-candles. I then used my digital camera and the formula given on that webpage and came up with 300 foot-candles. Much more trouble but I'll have to say, the result was actually pretty close :-)

As for the android application, I've never use it so can't help you with that one at all.

Hope this is helpful,

Art

Here is a link that might be useful: Cheap Light Meter

I've had really good results using a "LightScout DLI 100" light meter (by Spectrum Technologies, Inc.) for both indoor & outdoor measurements. Cost is a little bit more ($) than the Dr.Meter LX1330B. I've been very pleased with the quality of this meter, along with being able to measure PAR.

Here is the link to their site if interested ~ http://www.specmeters.com/ ~ once you are on their site, click on 'weather monitoring' and then click on 'light meters' under the heading of environmental meters. I don't know if they ship internationally since they are a US company, but you could always contact them to find out.

Thank you both for your responses.

I will see if any of those are required at the moment, after I downloaded a few light meter android applications. For the time being I will compromise without the PAR. My android - samsung Galaxy S Advance - an old model was not reporting seemingly correction lux of foot-candles numbers, so therefore I downloaded that applications in my wife's cell phone - a newer model - Samsung Galaxy Note 2 and it seems the numbers look fine as when I take it direct sunlight it shows me 11,900 foot-candles and as I bring it in the shade, they reduce and inside the house they reduce further - coming upto 10 foot candles. I also tried it by keeping on my window and as the sun rose the reading gradually went up from early morning sunrise - 100 fc onward to 2000 fc. No direct sun on my window.

The only further thing would be for me to have a comparison
with an actual meter. Perhaps one of you could download these 2 android applications and compare its result with the actual meter readings.

Here are the links

1/ This one gives both lux and fc readings and has a max reading of around 12000 fc and 129000 lux

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bti.lightMeter&hl=en

On your android phone you can search by "Light Meter
Borce Trajkovski"

2/ This one has a nice display but only lux reading and only a max of 102000 lux.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=spaceware.lightmeter&hl=en

On your android phone you can search by "
Light-O-Meter Spaceware"

Both have ok to good reviews - especially the first one where comparision with an actual meter have been reported by reviewers to be varying by approx. +/- 5%

Thanks again for the input.

Saood