The Werklicht bench hall at night, lit by one source off the left-hand wall
1204 mmBENCH · 1400 mm BELOW92° × 38°
Werklicht Optik · Camsdorfer Ufer 9, Jena · building since 2017

Nord/120

One suspended luminaire for benches where the colour has to be right the first time: 1 180 lux on a 1 200 × 900 mm top, Ra 98, and a pool flat enough that a brush held upright throws one shadow, not three.

See it drawn
Full measured sheet
Plate 00 · elevation at 1 : 12 · bench datum 1 400 mm

Six numbers we will put in writing.

Ra 98 · R9 96

Colour rendering is measured on every finished unit in our own 1 m sphere, not once per batch. The certificate ships in the crate with the serial on it.

1 180 lx

Maintained illuminance at the centre of a 1 200 × 900 mm bench, hung 1 400 mm above it. The corners sit at 742 lx — a uniformity of 0.63, measured on a nine-point grid.

2 700 – 6 500 K

Tunable white with mechanical detents at D50 (5 003 K) and D65 (6 504 K), so you can return to a reference point without reading a screen.

0.8 % flicker

Pst LM 0.4 and SVM 0.2 at every dim level down to 0.1 %. Nothing strobes under a camera, which is why half our lamps end up in photographic rooms.

86 W · 133 lm/W

Full output draws 86 watts; the driver idles at 0.4 W. Efficacy is quoted at 4 000 K because that is where most people actually leave it.

8 years

Parts and labour, driver and LED board included. We keep boards for every batch we have ever shipped, so a 2019 lamp is still repairable here.

Three pieces of plastic decide everything. Here is what each one does.

WL-62
PMMA, extruded
742 lx1180 lx742 lxlens chord 62 mmPLATE 03 · BATWING, IN RAYS

The batwing lens

A flat lens over a strip of LEDs puts a bright stripe under itself and nothing at the corners. The WL-62 does the opposite: it bends light away from the centre so the long diagonal throw and the short vertical throw arrive at the bench within 3 % of each other. Extruded in Jena from cast PMMA, 62 mm chord, 1 204 mm long, cut on a cold saw so the ends stay optically clear.

Beam
92° across · 38° along
Transmission
91.4 % at 555 nm
Uniformity
0.63 over 1.08 m²
How we measured it →
WL-31
Satin film, 0.3 mm
half-angle 31°one die, one rayPLATE 03b · SCATTER

The diffuser

Ninety-six dies in a row will read as ninety-six dies in a row on anything glossy — a varnish, a glazed tile, a wet ground. The WL-31 is a 0.3 mm satin film sitting 11 mm off the board, which is the exact distance at which the dies merge and the lens still works. It costs us 4.1 % of the output and we would not sell the lamp without it.

Stand-off
11 mm from die plane
Loss
4.1 % of luminous flux
Result
No visible dies at 400 mm
Where it sits in the stack →
WL-08
Anodised blades
65°UGR 16 at the seated eyePLATE 03c · CUT-OFF

The louvre

Everything steeper than 65° from vertical is light going into somebody's eye instead of onto the work. Eleven anodised blades, pitch 62 mm, bonded not screwed, take that out and bring the glare rating down to UGR 16 at a seated head 900 mm from the bench edge. You lose 6 % of the flux. Nobody has ever asked for it back.

Cut-off
65° from vertical
Blades
11 · pitch 62 mm
Glare
UGR 16 seated
The full photometric sheet →
The workshop

Two of us, forty lamps, one month.

Hedda Vogelsang cuts and anodises the extrusion; Anselm Prieß populates and burns in the boards. Everything else — the lens, the film, the blades, the driver — arrives from four suppliers within 180 km of the Saale. We assemble on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, measure on Thursdays, and crate on Friday morning.

What we do not do: colour-matched housings, recessed versions, anything under 900 mm, or a battery model. We have tried three of the four and they were worse lamps.

Eleven parts, one page
Two hands marking out a flat aluminium part against a steel rule on a bench
Anselm marking an end cap, Camsdorfer Ufer, Thursday 09:20
Four lengths of metal tube catching a warm edge light against black
Extrusion stock, batch 14, before anodising
Close detail of a row of thin aluminium cooling fins
Fin stack — 34 °C at the board after four hours at full output

One bench, one Thursday in February.

Readings taken at the centre of Marguerite Dulac's bench in Jena, 14 February, with a Konica-style cosine head on the varnish line. The lamp is doing the arithmetic; she is not.

Low winter sun coming through a tall window into an otherwise dark roomNorth-east window, Dulac studio, 08:41
118088059030008:4113:1017:5021:40daylightNord 120PLATE 05 · LUX AT THE BENCH CENTRE
The lamp is the part of the column you never notice: it fills whatever the window has stopped giving, to 1 180 lx, within 400 ms of the reading changing.
08:41

The window wins, badly

1 020 lx at the near edge of the bench, 240 lx at the far edge, and 5 900 K falling to 5 200 K across 900 mm. Any judgement made in that gradient is a judgement about where she was standing.

13:10

Cloud, and the lamp takes over

Daylight drops to 300 lx in eleven minutes. The Nord 120 is already at D50 and holds the bench at 1 180 lx; the only thing that changes on the table is that the far corner stops being darker than the near one.

17:50

Alone, and unbothered

No daylight at all. 4 000 K, 1 180 lx, uniformity 0.63. The varnish line she retouched at nine in the morning is the same colour at six in the evening — which is the whole point of the instrument.

21:40

Wound down to 2 700 K

Writing up, not matching. 300 lx, warm, louvred. We did not build a circadian feature and we do not claim one — we built a dimmer that goes to 0.1 % without stepping, and people use it.

The pool, drawn to scale.

Every page on this site is laid out on these three rings. This is where they come from: a nine-point measurement of one Nord 120 over one 1 200 × 900 mm bench, hung at 1 400 mm, at 4 000 K and full output.

BENCH 1200 × 900 mm · OAK, SATINNORD 120 · HUNG 1400 mm ABOVE THIS PLANE1180 lx750 lx300 lx1200 mm900 mm1180 lx · colour match750 lx · reference300 lx · marginnine measured pointsPLATE 02 · ISOLUX PLAN · 4000 K · 100 % · LUXMETER SERIAL 7741 · 14.02.2026 · WERKLICHT OPTIK, JENA
A dim workshop interior with one working light over the far bench

€2 340, and nothing after it.

One price, including nineteen per cent MwSt, the suspension kit, the certificate with your serial on it and shipping anywhere inside the EU. There is no accessory list, no extended warranty to buy, and no model above this one. If you want it in white instead of graphite, we will say no.

Price
€2 340 incl. MwSt · €1 966 net
Batch size
40 per month, never more
Lead time
4 weeks from cleared payment
Warranty
8 years, parts and labour
Join batch 14
Hall 2 at 18:05, the week batch 13 went out
01 / 01
In use since batch 9

“I stopped carrying a loupe to the window. That is the honest measure of it — eleven months in, the far corner of the bench and the near corner are the same colour, and I have not once gone outside to check a retouch.”

Marguerite Dulac, photographed against the dark wall of her studio
Marguerite DulacPaintings conservator · Stadtmuseum Jena · two Nord 120 over a 2.4 m bench

Batch 14 opens
3 November.

Forty lamps. We write to the list the morning it opens and it has gone by the afternoon four times out of five. No deposit is taken here — this is only the notice.

We hold your address until the batch after next and then delete it. Werklicht Optik GmbH, Camsdorfer Ufer 9, 07749 Jena.