Judging or measuring clarity as wine is clearing - how clear is clear enough

SatchIce9

Has anyone got an objective method for measuring the clarity of wine as it's clearing?
There will always be a strong element of subjective judgement I suppose, but I've tried to think of ways to take some of the subjectivity out of it.
One method I've come up with is to shine my LED bike light through one side of the demijon and look at it through the other side. When the wine is still cloudy/hazy, I just see a glow of diffuse light through wine to the other side. As the wine gets clearer, I can see the 5 indivudal LEDs of the light (see attached pic) and there is less of a diffuse glow as the light goes more directly through the wine with less scattering. That's not foolproof though because it also depends on the ambient light level when I do this - if it's dark or night time in the place where I do this (garage) its easier to see the 5 LEDs than in the daytime.
I've also wondered if a laser pointer could replace the LED light - shine the laser pointer beam through the demijon onto a white card to see if you can see a dot, but I don't have a laser pointer to try it for myself. Has anyone else tried that?
I've heared of the newspaper test - where if you can read newsprint through the wine then its certainly clear enough. I thought about using an eyetest chart with progressively smaller text or letters. What's the smallest text you can see through the wine - and use that as an objective measure of how clear the wine is.
Just thought I'd post this to share ideas and start a discussion.

TheBluePhantom

Yep, I am in the basement, but I have a window. I usually work down there in the evenings anyway. When the beam is very clear, then look at the side view. You can see the beam passing through the wine by the reflections off of the tiny particles. As these clear the beam get harder to see and finally disappears. Bouncing the beam off the bottom will show you how much crud is on the bottom. All is easier on light wines, or in my case ciders, but you can see through rather dark ones. I botte the wines, keg the ciders after I can't detect any particles.

Raptor99

I tried this, but it was difficult for me to see the text. Maybe the wine wasn't clear enough? Maybe eventually I will try this again. I could set up a clarity scale with numbers from 1 to 10.
The visibility of the text would also depend on the size (width) of the carboy.

SatchIce9

Yes Raptor99, that's something I didn't mention with any measurement or judgement of clarity. My clear glass demijons (carboys) are 16cm in diameter, so if you can read text or see the light clearly through them, it would of course be even clearer through say a 7cm diameter clear glass bottle or through a wine glass because of the shorter distance through the thickness of wine the light has to travel as there's less opportunity for light scattering from any microscopic particles that cause haze or cloudiness.
Another problem with trying to view text through them is the distortion due to the curvature of glass distorting things like a lens. It works best if you hold the print to the curvature of the glass and view it perpendicular through the middle to minimise the lens like distortion.
I'd love someone to try the laser pointer idea if they have one, and report their findings here. Some laser pointers are red light and some green light, so that might make a difference in red wines.