BACKGROUND Icter is the most prevalent disease in newborns. Although most of the newborns affiliated with this seem healthy in other aspects, there is always a fear for toxic complication of indirect hyperbilirobinemia in the central nervous system. Nowadays phototherapy is the method of decreasing (or avoidance of increase) of total serum bilirobin (TSB) and it is also used widely in neonatal health care centers according to the availably of equipment, but without any defined standard. In this study, two light sources, quarts halogen incandescent filament lamp (QHIFL) and fluorescent lamp (FL) are compared with each other to find out which method is more useful and efficient. METHODS This study is a randomized controlled trial done on 25 newborns with gestational age of 35 weeks or more, with newborn's icter in the 1(st) week after birth, at Isfahan Behesti Hospital, February 2012 to March 2013. A group of these newborns was treated with FL and the other with QHIFL and they all were controlled and tested according to their level of TSB at the beginning of phototherapy, at 8(th), 12(th), and 24(th) h of treatment and at discharge. The data from the study was analyzed by IBM SPSS Statistics Version 21. RESULTS According to the findings, the level of TSB before and 8 h after the intervention had no significant difference among the groups. However, at 16(th) and 24(th) h of treatment, the TSB level was lower in the FL group and this difference was meaningful (P = 0.002 and P = 0.013 respectively). Furthermore the duration of the treatment was significantly shorter in FL group meaningfully (P = 0.047). CONCLUSIONS According to the findings of this study, the technology used in QHIFL cannot show the capabilities of the FLs. However, more studies are needed to confirm the findings of this study are universal.