I was recently at LDI in Orlando and spent a lot of time showing our new LED fixtures that we were premiering there. Something that struck me was the amount of people that were caught up in the technical features of the lights but didn’t really look at the quality of the light that the fixtures produced. There are two things that seemed the most important, how bright the units were, and, of course, PRICE was a big issue. We had screens set up for the folks to look at the light but most people swung the light around and wanted to see the distance that the light would work efficiently. I find it curious that we are so caught up in comparing the standard shortcomings of LED technology but not how the light illuminates. We showed a 50 watt warm white LED Fresnel that had an amazing incandescent warm tone to the light. I had several people show surprise that it wasn’t an incandescent source. As a matter of fact, the LED version is brighter than it’s 250 watt incandescent sister. I think that it is great that the LED sources are getting to the point that they can rival the incandescent sources but we also need to think about the CRI and the warmth and quality of the light AND what it looks like as it illuminates the object that it is focused on. Yes, the process is important but the result is the priority!!!
