The paper describes the usage of a conventional lamp equipped with a linear halogen bulb for physics
experiments. The irradiance gain and limitation of spectral resolution are treated in detail
theoretically and verified experimentally. The analysis shows that, in comparison with a standard
bulb and slit arrangement, the linear bulb can increase irradiance of the spectrum image by an order
of magnitude without a significant loss of spectral resolution in comparable experimental
arrangements. Some concrete examples of experiments with a white light spectrum and diffraction are
presented.