From The Horse's Mouth

The LEDs archnemesis is heat generated by the action of photons on the chip. The LED can be rated for various wattages but a trick that some manufacturers use is to overdrive the LED rating to a higher rating. As an example some 1 watt LEDs are driven to run off of 3 watts. Some 3 watt LEDs are driven to 5 watts. The downside of these is that they will require more cooling or the manufacturer will downgrade the LED life from 50,000 hours to a lesser life. With all of this heat transfer many LED fixtures need to add faster or larger or numerous fans to pull the heat away from the LED components. There is actually a fixture on the market that uses liquid cooling. These are all very good ways to deal with the heat but imagine your theatre of the future with 300 LED fixtures running individual fans. When fan cooled devices are involved call your dealer and get a demo unit to see how it will fit in with the cacophony of noise in your theatre or museum. There are fixtures that do not use fans. Apollo will have a new Multiform LED fixture coming out in late winter that has a larger heatsink to cool 1 and 3 watt RGBAW LEDs. This also makes the unit IP65 rated as there is no fan to suck water into the unit. It has many other features of the fixtures that are coming out on the market as well. We are learning what you, the consumer, are needing in this developing technology and adding those features. Yes, the LED is the light of the future but it is also far more complex than the incandescent light bulb and will require the consumer to learn about the technology, especially in entertainment lighting applications.

Yes, I asked the question! You’re thinking, well, Hoop if you don’t know that, then you are not much of a lighting designer (or color blind). I ask the question because in my design days, when I brought a 750 watt Altman fixture up to full, THAT was white (or no color) and that was that. Nowadays, with RGB LEDs, warm white and cool white LEDs, white light just isn’t white light anymore.

I recently changed my dining room light over to 5200 degree LEDs. My family still can’t get used to it. I forgive the discrepancy because I am saving on my energy bills but the kids are saying that it just isn’t natural light. So what will you say to your director when he or she says that white light is just too white? We must remember that incandescent light has a warm yellowish white or amberish white hue. That has become this AND the past generation’s benchmark for white. As you choose the future LED fixtures for your facility, you will need to take this all into consideration. Do I have a solution? No. I just have a piece of advice; don’t just consider cost, features, and brightness of a new LED fixture. Think of how you can mix the colors or color to blend with the incandescent sources and how you will eventually faze in the new technology to replace the old technology with the REAL white light (and get it through that director’s thick skull that it is a better white light)!

I spent last week at LDI in Las Vegas and it brought up a few questions. First, is $3000 an acceptable price for a LED framing spot? I was presenting a discussion on our laser cut gobos at a green technology session and there were several LED products shown there. When one manufacturer mentioned that the price of their light was in the neighborhood of $3,000, I was expecting to hear a groan or gasp but saw folks nodding or shrugging. I was intrigued that it seemed acceptable. As I looked out over the tradeshow floor, I saw a HUGE number of LED products and many were in the neighborhood of $2,000 to $3,000. We carry a few LED fixtures that retail for $440 and $695. Yes, these units are not as bright but have many of the same features as the more expensive units. We also showed a new product, the Spotlight Midi LED Zoom. This is a RGBW fixture with 25 watts per color output, which will retail in the neighborhood of $1,500 and has a cool feature of DMX zoom from 12 to 50 degrees. I think the price is pretty good but if you compare it to the cost of a 6″ Fresnel, it is way expensive. Mind you, it uses no gel and can be used on a Right Arm to give you even more versatility. Is it “affordable”? Well, yes, if you compare it to the other LED fixtures but NO if you use only incandescent fixtures. It just seems that all of the research and new products have shifted to LED technology completely and there isn’t going to be much in new gear for the theaters with medium to small budgets. Any thoughts?

If you were not at the New Product Breakfast at LDI, then you missed this video!
 

LED technology is changing almost weekly. As you look through the trade magazines, you will notice that there are many LED PARs out there. They all look the same but the features are very different. Some use 3 watt LEDs some use 1 watt LEDs. Some have an amber channel along with the RGB channels, some are only RGB. Some use separately mounted red, blue, and green single LEDs and some have RGB LED chipsets. So what is the difference?

1 watt versus 3 or more watts LED
If you are hoping to match the lumen output of a 1,000 watt PAR with an LED, you have some waiting to do. You will not find anything in the price range of an incandescent PAR can to match with LED fixtures. The 3 watt LED fixture is certainly brighter than the 1 watt fixture but will need bigger fans and in some cases will shorten the life of the LEDs by overdriving them. Remember when buying most LED fixtures, the entire fixture is thrown out at the end of its life cycle not just the lamp. Higher LED output does come with louder fans and releases more heat,  but in some larger facilities, club and rock venues, noise and heat is not an issue. As you look at higher wattage LED fixtures, the price goes up as would be expected. Some LED PAR fixtures are weighing in at $2,200 each. In my days in the biz, a PAR can was something that when it fell off the truck, you just threw it away because they only cost $60. They were really only metal road cases for the expensive PAR lamp.

Light distribution
When you place regular diffusion on an LED fixture, odd things happen. The fixture usually uses multiple light sources so you will not get the even light distribution that you would get with (continue reading…)

Just a note to those attending LDI in sunny Las Vegas Oct 22-24 that Apollo will be located in booth 1412.
Please be sure to stop by to say hello and while you’re there get a hands on demo of the Spotlight Architectural products and the Multiform LED fixtures.

Looking forward to seeing you at LDI!

In my years of stage lighting, I worked in many facilities that were converted from other uses to venues for shows. There are several types of facilities that are more popular than others. Churches are the most common. They are a natural choice for converting in that they have the seating or space for an audience and a natural performance area. They occasionally have track lighting or wired lighting positions installed as well. These spaces are usually smaller than theatres and have lower ceilings. Another popular venue is a converted storefront. These are common because the space is fairly inexpensive to rent. NOTE: be aware that as a renter of the space, you may be required to leave the permanently mounted lighting positions as well as any staging built into the space when your lease is terminated. When working with physically smaller spaces with lower ceilings, the electrician should consider using smaller physical profile fixtures. The Spotlight mini line from Apollo works beautifully (continue reading…)

I am in the middle of a project comparing various lighting colors to LED colors. I am finding some obvious differences but also discovering some interesting things. A big issue with using LED fixtures on stage or in event lighting is eventually we will need to match an LED fixture with a standard incandescent fixture with a gel. I am finding that RGB LEDs can get very close to most colors in a swatchbook.   

But what do we do about the dreaded amber shift that happens when you dim an incandescent lamp down?  There are LED fixtures that actually have an incandescent dimmer curve programmed into the software that, when dimmed, will emulate the “reddening” of the color or amber shift that happens naturally when the filament cools. These are very impressive but are really a stop gap measure to duplicate an all incandescent rig which will eventually go to obsolescence.

These artificial dimmer curves work well for mixing the two technologies but lighting designers are going to have to face the fact that LED “cleaner” dimmer curves are going to become the norm and that cross fades between cues will change visually. This is not a bad thing! In the incandescent days, I spent lots of time and effort smoothing out a choppy cross fade or keeping the stage from going to darkness when using poorly trimmed dimmers. The new technology will help that. One of the idiosyncrasies is that certain primaries will be seen by the eye sooner than others, so you may see a red or green tint earlier than the other colors. These issues will be different from fixture to fixture but our eyes will forgive a lot of the peaks.

As a designer, you can start planning for this eventuality by borrowing, renting, or buying an RGB or RGBA DMX controlled LED fixture and experimenting with primary color mixing. I would highly recommend using only a basic RGB fixture to work with because it may be the only fixture that a theatre can afford initially and will be more common than the RGBA, RGBW, or the seven color mixing fixtures. You will be quite surprised at the color range that these fixtures can hit. Adding an additional amber channel will help to create the warmer tones but is not absolutely essential. I am firmly convinced that over the next 20 to 30 years standard incandescent theatre fixtures will be replaced by LED sources. We may as well get ready for that evolution and start working with the toolbox.

As new lower wattage control gear and LED lighting fixtures come onto the market, there are a few more connectors that are becoming more and more common. As you lose a cable to your gear, you can usually run to a Radio Shack or even dig through your old computer gear to find the proper power cord.  I will be discussing the two most common cables. Both are classified by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) and have amperage limits placed on them.

C5 and C6 Connectors

The first is the C5 and C6 connectors. The C5 is the female version on the cord end and the C6 is the male panel mount. They are rated at 2.5 amps. The way to recognize these (continue reading…)

Rich Dale, Apollo Lighting Design Representative, will be participating in the BLMC Manufacturers Showcase May 25-26 at NYU’s Kimmel Center. He will be demonstrating a selection of our Spotlight mini luminaires, Multiform LEDs, Smart Color PRO  scroller and more! Click here for more information on BLMC.