LED vs traditional

[DJ bradderz]

I am writing a short essay on LED Vs Traditional light sources for my degree. Please feel free to add any comments on the subject.

 

Thank you for your input.

Bradley

[Just Some Bloke]

I think I should get in here first before the torrent of posts floods in.

 

I'm pretty sure everyone will say the same thing: WHAT FOR?

 

Everything has its place, it's just a matter of knowing what place that is. Personally I think that in the main LED looks rubbish lighting faces and tungsten loses out when you put a deep colour in it. So for me I might use Source 4 profiles for face light and LED movers for backlight colour washes, but then again if I had 1 x 13A socket to use to light a whole show then I'd almost certialy use LED for everything, whereas if I turned up at a venue that had 200 tungesten lamps that came without charge and LEDs would cost extra to hire then it's highly unlikely I'd be hiring.

 

Horses for courses.

 

It means, of course, that I can't answer your poll as you don't give any context. I suspect others may feel the same.

[ImagineerTom]

Out of curiosity if you essay is on LED v Filament why aren't you asking questions about why people choose one or the other.

 

Your questions are effectively "Landrover or Lamboughini, what would you choose" when the answer depends entirely on what you're using them for - A landrover is perfect for driving around a muddy fesitval site but terrible for driving long distances at speed, A Lamboughini is great for driving really fast with at most one passenger but would be absolutely useless if you have to pick the kids up from school on a road with speedbumps. Likewise the choice of light source (which is what your question is) is based on a whole range of needs; some of which are best served by Filament, some by Arc, some by LED based light sources; the decision is almost never based on "which one do you fancy"

[Yorkie]

I've just been looking at LED's vs Sodium for site floodlights. 50W LED is about the same Lm as a 70W SON. LED can provide a CT much more like daylight. LED twice the price and twice the longevity of a SON. However, when a SON fails the lamp and ignitor are replaceable, whereas with LED's the whole fitting has had it. SON is proven technology too

[timsabre]

I've just been looking at LED's vs Sodium for site floodlights. 50W LED is about the same Lm as a 70W SON. LED can provide a CT much more like daylight. LED twice the price and twice the longevity of a SON. However, when a SON fails the lamp and ignitor are replaceable, whereas with LED's the whole fitting has had it. SON is proven technology too

 

Other thing with LED floodlights (or at least all the ones I see for sale) is they are REALLY wide angle - pretty much 180 degrees. So your lumens get spread over a much wider area (mostly up in the sky) which makes them less effective, and also very "glaring". Conventional floodlights have much better beam control keeping the light in the direction you want it.

[top-cat]

Speaking as a graduate, I hope you don't mind me saying that the poll in it's current state will not be of any use to you. It proves nothing, and is nowhere near comprehensive enough to represent the actual feelings of lighting designers when considering LED and conventional options.

 

It's not just a case of 'what for', it's also a fact that both options in numerous settings offer advantages and disadvantages, to the point that on many occasions I have used mixed rigs of LED and conventional PAR cans.

 

In some applications you might prefer conventional pars in every respect, but the venue simply does not have enough power to use them effectively. On the other hand, you might prefer LED but you're more constrained by budget in which case hiring PAR cans and dimmer may come in cheaper - especially on high-output units. I know we associate LED with cheap, but to be honest, decent (both in terms of colours, output, build quality and customer service) LED units are still pretty expensive, and that cost is passed to the hirer. There are so many variables that you can't simply say "I prefer an LED PAR can but an MSD mover" because there is no such situation where things are that simple. Even in an ideal world with unlimited power and unlimited budget I expect that my rig would have a mixture of all sorts of light sources in it.

 

 

Onto education:

 

My experience from writing essays throughout university and my final works was that surveys (as in your own) are nigh on useless. You're just not realistically going to get enough people completing a long enough survey to give you a meaningful result. You've also no way of quantifying who those people are and what experience they have. The statistic that "35% of random people on the internet prefer LED PAR cans to conventionals" is no more use than "35% of random people on the internet prefer brown sauce to ketchup". You've no way of telling which of your entries are from touring lighting designers with 100+ fixture rigs, and which are from animal-psychology students who like to play with WYSIWYG in their bedroom. The statistic means nothing. Interviewing 30 lighting designers by e-mail with their thoughts on LED would be a thousand times more use to you, than 100 responses from random people on the internet. At least you could cross-section it and see if there is a correlation between theatre LDs or one between rock n roll LDs and if the two are different... if you can map your responses to particular areas of the industry, sizes of venue, budgets of show etc then that kind of information is actually useable.

 

The best thing to use as research is things you can prove. A nicely written letter to a major lighting hire company might lead them to send you a selection of lighting specs for tours sent out in 2012, 2007, and 2002... and you could compare the use of LED in each of these years. TPI and LSI magazines usually cover a tour or major show each month, so reading back through 10 years of TPI and LSI magazines (which should be available online, if not, contact the publishers who may be able to help) would also let you compare what fixtures were common in each year and let you study the impact of LED on those touring specifications. Remember to read the interviews too - the LDs being interviewed will probably open up as to what made them choose each fixture. Using google images to look at major shows is better than nothing, you may not be able to recognise the actual fixtures, but you may be able to tell whether they are LED sources or otherwise.

 

All these ideas I've come up with in the last 5 minutes and all of them are quantifiable and can be mapped against certain factors that you wish to investigate, and even if you cannot reach a conclusion (there is nowt wrong with an inconclusive essay) you should at least be able to draw relationships between the factors in question and the fixtures chosen if you research enough shows. If you are putting 50+ hours a week into your studies (which is what you should be doing) then you should be able to cover quite a lot of shows over the course of several weeks and really start to identify these relationships - and once you have those relationships, THEN maybe you could go back to forums with specific, targeted questions for people to answer which might help you draw conclusions with regards to the relationships which you have identified.

 

This is how to research. SImply sticking a poll on the internet and attempting to draw some sort of pie chart out the responses is a cop out that your lecturers will have seen before and will identify straight away, resigning your essay to a poor grade.

[jonathanhill]

Why am I not allowed to choose a tungsten mover?

[vinntec]

Bradley - I live on the serious side of the amateur world which means I am a lighting designer who lights productions in multiple venues in as close to a professional way as possible - and I have been doing it since 1968. It so happens that my theatre has just purchased Philips Selecon LEDs and you can see the final article about the workshop I held here. Proper theatrical LEDs are expensive to purchase compared to their tungsten cousins - they have many advantages but they also have some snags. If you PM me I will send you the original article before it was sanitised plus the slides I used for the main workshop - if they would be of any use to give you an idea of WHY we considered LEDs at all, WHAT we purchased, and HOW we intend to use them.

 

However we are a physically small theatre that does particular kinds of production and have very short throws, so what is perfect for the Chesil is not the same as a theatre up to road. We also don't have anywhere near enough funds to switch over to LED completely - we have conventional lanterns which do a good job already and for which the infrastructure already exists. So my intention was never to replace what we had but instead to use them where appropriate to complement what we already have.

 

For any particular production the lighting needs to be appropriate - which means provides as much of the vision of the director as possible for the budget available. On the amateur side the budget is normally minuscule so - like many professionals - we do the best job we can with what we have available, with small hires to fill "must have" needs of the director. With my other hat on I also light musicals at much larger venues where the distances are much longer and the lighting demands much more complex. So typically I use a mixture of conventionals, scrollers, and movers to provide a solution for the least possible cost (the movers tending to be justified to do multiple specials, with special effects as a bonus when appropriate). The next musical I am doing will certainly include some LED lighting as the theatre has some as well as my own venue. Cyc lighting - no contest. Backlighting of saturated colours - no contest. Side and top lighting - perhaps. Face lighting - why, the conventional do this perfectly well and brighter?

 

What is your research targeted at? Theatre, concerts, Ballet/Opera, live music, discos, teaching? Professional and/or amateur? For each of these the LX needs - hence basic building blocks - are not the same. To be of any use you need to narrow this down then start collecting information one way or the other. The views of a hundred random people, who will have a wide range of genres and experience, maybe none at all - is not going to mean anything. So if you are doing research, why not do some searching on the internet, get some magazines, arrange to visit and interview some lighting designers doing a nearby show (but not during get-in time!) Help out at your local amateur venue. What are your own experiences?

 

Peter

[mark_s]

As written by Richard Pilbrow for the ALD's Save Tungsten campaign:

 

We designers welcome and embrace change. We revel in new things and new lights. But we cannot throw away all the good things that we have inherited. We applaud new light sources, we will learn their characteristics, and enjoy the new opportunities they bring.

 

We must have flexible light...at the present time, that means that the incandescent lamp is an essential weapon in the designers’ arsenal

(my highlight)

 

As he (and several people on this thread) mention, it's not a choice of one over the other, but of the end result you're trying to achieve. As a professional lighting designer, I would be led by the artistic (and occasionally practical) requirements of the production; there is no other light source (in my opinion) which offers the subtlety and flexibility of tungsten. Equally if I was lighting a concert in a fast-paced production environment, I might choose LED based on the sheer flexibility it gives me to change a look with a few button presses. Neither technology wins, they're both equally valuable tools in our arsenal.

 

And as Jonathan says, where is my 'MAC TW1/Source 4 Revolution' option!?

[paulears]

None of your questions in the poll have anything to do with the quality of light, just presence of light. very different.

 

Maybe I'm too old, but when degrees were not just handed out, there were members of staff who scrutinised the question before approving it for use. Now we're full of pointless degree work, and over the past few months we've had some corkers!

[top-cat]

Maybe I'm too old, but when degrees were not just handed out

 

I think, what you mean is, but back when the world hadn't realised that selling education, regardless of it's real world value or the usefulness of it's content, was a licence to print money and send thousands of young people out into the world with false hopes and unattainable dreams...

 

the people delivering them actually gave a damn about the people partaking in them.

[indyld]

Now we're full of pointless degree work, and over the past few months we've had some corkers!

 

To be fair, if you are talking about here on the BR, then sticking a (to be frank) not particularly well designed quantitative poll on an internet forum is surely likely to go hand in hand with 'corkers' in terms of research questions and chosen methods. If someone is misguided, by all means tell them, as happens here frequently. Let's leave the tired old generalisms about degrees at the door.

 

I lead the research elements of the curriculum at our place and I can report some really strongly refined questions, methods and outputs. Of course, if the technical theatre and production industry was really interested in understanding itself, it might be interested in some of the outputs from even my first year students. Individually, in fact, industry people are interested if they have taken part in interviews etc. and I believe that a number of research outputs from undergraduates actually have something to say.

 

As an example, I recently collected a series of three papers from Year 1 students themed around the last 30 years of development in technology and practice. The final work was distributed internally (for now) and two looked at long running productions (Woman In Black, Blood Brothers) and one at a long standing theatre/company (RST / RSC). Each paper used some strong and high level industry input and each highlighted different sides of current elements in practice and suggested future trends.

 

I currently have third years looking at some extremely interesting and quite specific elements of their area of interest. Some will be better that others, of course. A few will likely be really something and worth reading if anyone took them seriously, being mere undergraduates.

 

Edit to add: PS. I wonder if there might be an opportunity for a Facebook group detailing faux pas in the world of technical theatre research. Under a working title of 'Dodgy Theoreticians' the group could be a Mecca for re-posting old pictures of weak practice in enthnography, bad data collation and poorly structured conclusions being ripped apart by willy waving post grads. No? Oh, ok then..... Such a group would probably break out in bad feeling and everyone would leave.