Indeed, and much is the same for a 6" downlight - or, indeed, any sort of ceiling-mounted small light fitting. As you will understand, I was responding primarily to what seemed to be a perpetuation of the view that downlights were 'small torches'.
As I see it, the main issue with any physically small light source is that of shadows - which is why one needs more than one 'small' source such as a downlight.
The traditional solution to that relied on light reflected from the ceiling, but the only light sources which directly illuminate the ceiling (other than uplighters) were 'dangling things' (like pendants and chandeliers) - and the alternative to ceiling illumination is to have light sources (e.g. 'tubes' and 'panels') which represent much more 'spread out' light sources.
I don't really understand that - at least, in terms of illumination of a whole room. For a given light output, illumination will obviously be brighter 'within the cone' with a narrower beam angle, but the cone will obviously be much narrower - and, as above, a single 6" downlighter will probably have almost as big a 'shadow problem' as a 2" one.
As above, any small ceiling-mounted light source (whether downlight or anything else) results in problems of shadows (as would, to a large extent, a pendant, if fitted with a small shade which prevented light being transmitted upwards of the horizontal) - so relatively shadow-free lighting requires more than one of them. However, the point about large beam angle ones is that one generally needs far fewer of them to produce reasonably even and shadow-free illumination of work areas than is the case with narrow-beam ones. In addition to the direct advantages of the 'wider cone', wide-angle ones will produce more illumination of walls (hence some secondary illumination of the ceiling), which will further help to reduce shadows.
Of course, if people are aesthetically happy with a dangling 'GLS'-style pendant, then that is probably the best.
Kind Regards, John
