This paper presents a novel method to study how well non-imaging daylight collectors pipe diffuse daylight into long horizontal funnels for illuminating deep buildings. Forward ray tracing is used to derive luminous intensity distributions curves (LIDC) of such collectors centered in an arc-shaped light source representing daylight. New photometric characteristics such as 2D flux, angular spread and horizontal offset are introduced as a function of such LIDC. They are applied for quantifying and thus comparing different collector contours. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.