[Physics] the difference between ‘Illumination’ and ‘Illuminance’, if any

terminologyvisible-light

What is the difference between 'Illumination' and 'Illuminance', if any?

From my knowledge, both of them have the same unit, the lux. So are the two words used to refer to the same parameter or are they different in any aspect?

Best Answer

Most folks stick with "illuminance." The ISO/NIST standard for units and abbreviations does not include the word "illumination," because it's often used in a qualitative sense rather than quantitative.

But if Warren Smith uses both, per the following quote from the Third Edition of Modern Optical Engineering, you can, too. :-)

Illumination, or illuminance, is the luminous flux per unit area incident on a surface. The most widely used unit of illumination is the foot-candle. One footcandle is one lumen incident per square foot. The misleading name footcandle resulted from the fact that it is the illumination produced on a surface one foot away from a source of onecandle intensity. The photometric term illuminance corresponds to irradiance in radiometry.