Difference between LED's

[trevnet]

I'm looking to purchase a number of lights to use for uplighting and am having a real hard time figuring out which ones to get because there are so many options and differences in price. My question is 2 fold:

1. Does anyone have any recommendations on LED lights to use for event uplighting and why would you recommend it?
2. Are there any major performance differences in LED that are 3in1 (RGB), 5in1 (RGBWA), or 6in1 (RGBWA +UV)? IE: brightness, lifespan, etc.

Thank so much in advance for your info!

 

 

 

[dashroom66]

Hi

 

1. This depends on your price range. Thomann has some decent dirt cheap ones, after that there are some good LEDj and Chauvet units for a bit more money and with better performance.

2. There is a fairly big difference, though in short RGB is usually perfectly fine for uplighters. The addition of white allows much better "colour rendering" when used to create a white. When you try to make white with just RGB it usually looks rubbish, the dedicated white makes whites and less saturated colours look better. The amber allows you to mix some nice warm whites, though this is not crucial with uplighters. UV is more of a disco effect when used in disco setups, I cannot think of a use for it in uplighters.

 

Hope that helps,

George

[Don Allen]

With my 6in1 led par's The u/v has visible light in it, more like a congo blue. It enhances blues but does not provide a dark stage, unlike the flouro tube u/v's, where only the flouresecent material is highly visible.

 

The more colours you have in all in ones, the less power in individual led's, so a 12W RGB 3in1 would have a brighter red than a 15W 6in1 if the same led manufacturer was compared. The ratio of power in the different colour led's is not equal. You need to look at the manual to see what the ratios are.

 

One of the more useful features of uplighters now is battery operated with wireless, but in the long term you have battery replacement to consider and possible wireless interference, but they speed up setup.

[top-cat]

With my 6in1 led par's The u/v has visible light in it, more like a congo blue. It enhances blues but does not provide a dark stage, unlike the flouro tube u/v's, where only the flouresecent material is highly visible.

 

 

This is basically what all 'UV' in Hex LEDs is. It's not black-light, it is congo.

 

The development basically stems from the realisation that you can't get darker shades of the primary colours (Red Green and Blue) from LED units. RGB is an additive system, so it adds bits of red light, green light and blue light to create it's colours. The problem is, whilst in a subtractive system - like CMY mixing - when you drop in a little bit of your cyan flag, you get a very very light, mostly-white shade of cyan; in an additive system - like RGB mixing - when you drop in a little bit of red, you still get the same shade of red as if using 100% red, just less light output.

 

Using RGBW LEDs can help with this. If you start with the white at full, and then add colour, the behaviour can mimic that of CMY a little more, but still not properly, since in CMY mixing, the more colour you add, the less white you get; whereas with RGBW mixing, adding more colour does not reduce the white, it stays constant.

 

The other fundamental problem in this scenario is that with RGB, your primary colours are Red Blue and Green, and you can create Cyan, Magenta and Yellow by mixing 100% each of any 2 colours. (So, Red+Green = Yellow; Red+Blue = Magenta, Green+Blue = Cyan). With CMY your primary colours are Cyan, Magenta and Yellow, BUT when you mix 100% of any 2 of those, you get Red, Green, and Congo - not blue. (Cyan+Magenta = Congo, Magenta+Yellow = Red, Cyan+Yellow = Green). Blue is made of Cyan and 50-75% magenta. So in essence, the blue chip in RGB fixtures it too high a temperature to allow you to ever create a congo colour mix - since as I alluded to earlier, reducing the amount of red or blue in a colour mix will not allow you to create a colour any darker than either primary colour within that mix. So really, somebody once upon a time should have opted for "Red Green Congo", not "Red Green Blue". But they didn't.

 

Now of course, whilst they do seem to have created a congo LED chip capable of outputting enough light to keep up with red and green chips, re-standardising the LED lighting system as R/G/CB rather than R/G/B would be a pain for everyone who has already programmed R/G/B systems, and would also be a pain for integrating R/G/B LED fixtures with multimedia systems which also use the RGB system. So they've had to add it as a 6th colour, which you can mix in as required.

 

I hope this makes sense, I'm not very good at explaining things but fundamentals of what I've said should roughly explain it

[dashroom66]

With my 6in1 led par's The u/v has visible light in it, more like a congo blue. It enhances blues but does not provide a dark stage, unlike the flouro tube u/v's, where only the flouresecent material is highly visible.

 

Learn something new everyday :-D

 

I've only ever used one type of can with UV, assuming that all the others were like the first type, and the UV was just UV, no congo - but this makes much more sense :-)

 

Might buy some like this to see how it looks

 

George

[paulears]

The specs for most LED UV emitters seem to have no output in the visible band, so why do some have appear to have light output we can see? Equally Lee 181 has not a lot of output lower than 400nm? It dies off quite quickly - with the spike at about 440nm-ish? Typical blue LEDs seem to be around 450-500nm, so not the same as Congo. However, does this mean that the materials that fluoresce do it with blues that are not actually consider UV (or even violet)?

[timsabre]

However, does this mean that the materials that fluoresce do it with blues that are not actually consider UV (or even violet)?

 

Yes.

Fluorescent paper and marker pens work with visible blue light.

 

In fact white LEDs work on the basis of a fluorescent material being activated by visible blue light. It's interesting to shine a blue light into a white LED and watch it light up white.

[musht]

The specs for most LED UV emitters seem to have no output in the visible band, so why do some have appear to have light output we can see?

 

Some vendors lie like dogs in the Sun (anonymous Chinese vendor)

 

Blacklight Blue fluro tube peaks at 365nm. Blue LED is centered around 470nm, give or take 20nm, getting closer to 500 it appears more cyan, lot of early LED stuff had cyan instead of blue leds.

 

Going below 470 the blue gets deeper, Royal Blue is around 420nm.

 

Lot of the "UV" LED stuff is actually around 400nm, 395-410 range which is really a deep purple.

 

Going below 400nm , LED cost escalates dramatically.

 

Sub 400nm LEDs should be treated with respect, power density is quite high and because the light is invisble no blink reflex, dinnae stare into LEDs at close range especially UV ones.

[trevnet]

Thanks for all the great info. So if you all had a choice, would you go with 9 x 18w 6 in 1, or 9 x 15w 5 in 1?

 

Here are the lights I'm looking into:

 

http://www.gzmqlight...info.asp?ID=182

or

http://www.gzmqlight...info.asp?ID=190

or

http://www.gzmqlight...info.asp?ID=167

 

But I'm opting out of the battery powered for this first round of buying so I can get more units for now.

[kaareolai]

Thanks for all the great info.

 

+1. Like! I just want to crash in and say this has been a very interesting thread so far! Maybe some of it should have been pinned!? :-)

 

 

Regards Kåre Olai

[paulears]

What sort of price are these, that is pretty important.

[top-cat]

They look like the very cheap chinese sort where the parts change frequently and even the manufacturer doesn't know much about what they're producing. Best avoided IMHO.

 

What is better is to find a company who build in China but with a national office in your country. Then you have a route for spares and service. This is why I'm loving Prolight at the moment. They're very well priced Chinese LED fixtures that we've come to love (or hate, if you're in the business of proper fixtures!), but fronted with a UK sales office and technical department, so if something goes wrong you have a good english speaking voice on the end of the phone with proper answers; and spares are largely kept in UK stock ready to get out you next day styley, not Chinese styley where even if they did work out what set of components your particular batch was using, you'd have to pay for a whole container to have your spare PSU shipped.

[musht]

They look like the very cheap chinese sort where the parts change frequently and even the manufacturer doesn't know much about what they're producing. Best avoided IMHO.

 

 

Got to agree there, the metal folded cases and random fan grilles don`t inspire confidence.

 

ADJ actually make some not crap LED stuff.

 

The U.S. Thomann of LEDs is Wiedamark:

 

http://www.wiedamark.com/ledspotlighting.aspx

 

RGBW if you want a bit more range than RGB for those pastel wedding marquee looks.

 

Amber is an inefficient colour, bright amber LED dice are expensive and up into red is most adversely affected by negative temp coefficient, hotter it gets dimmer it gets, cheap cans with low brightness bin amber on insufficient heat sinking, not so great.

 

White as an LED colour is lot more in demand, even the cheapest dice won`t be totally dire.

 

If you want UV as an effect, get some UV units seperately.

[trevnet]

I can get 16 of the RGBWA pars with wireless DMX, no battery power, in 2 8in1 flight cases and a wireless DMX receiver/transmitter, shipped from China to Texas, USA for $2300. The main reason I looked here in the first place is you see major US companies use this exact same style... like Blizzard Lighting for instance. Here is the ladies instagram account I've been talking to: http://instagram.com/kitten_lin. This actually how I found her. The lights come with a 1 year warranty. They'll send free parts and/or replacements if something goes bad within that year.

 

They also gave me a number of references to call in Texas. So seems pretty legit. Thoughts?

[Hilary Watts]

Have you contacted the references in Texas? If possible go and see one or two even if it's a long drive and find out exactly what gear they've got and how long they've had it. Have they had any problems and if so did the free parts and/or replacements arrive?