LED Fixtures - How Bright

[BenEdwards]

Noticed there are 150w RGB zoom profiles, was wondering how bright they are. I have some fairly cheap Erolite 10mm ones which I think are around 18Watt but trying to get my head around what they are equivalent to in terms of tungsten. I guess more expensive modern ones a lot brighter.

 

Are there any general guidelines to relative LED/tungsten brightness.

 

This is in the context of upgrading a venue. We have 12 circuits, currently all with tungstens (a mixture of par 64 and profile zooms).

 

Ben

 

 

 

[Zero88FatFrog]

Hello

 

The ETC Source Four Lustr 2s are around the 150w mark and from the product demo, very hard to notice the difference compared with a generic Source Four ellipsoidal.

At the moment there's no way of getting round the fact if you want bright good quality LED fixtures, you need to have a large budget.

 

Personally my ideal LED upgrade would be the Source Four Lustrs and for PARs something like high end Visage products.

 

Hope this helps

Edward

[paulears]

It's almost impossible to get any sensible information from the specs, because they measure so many different things that make comparison so difficult.

 

I've seen HUGE changes in brightness, and have swapped completely from thinking they're feeble gloworms to very bright things indeed. The old notion of measuring the white output doesn't really work any longer because slapping a primary blue colour into a discharge mover really dims them. Modern multi-cell LEDs have extremely bright saturated red, green, and blue, and going to magenta adds light, not subtracts it. The upshot being that unless you are only looking at white light, the LEDs, even the no branded Chinese ones are extremely bright. I have some at the moment that have 12 4 colour LEDs in a cross format as the light source, and on the dimmest setting, you cannot look into them. These are rated at 90W, and wipe out 250W discharges and are brighter than my 575W discharges on any colour except white. The 8 washes I currently have up completely wash a fairly large stage, and for the first time I can colour a stage any colour - the old 2K Fresnels could never do this.

 

LED profiles in the theatre style are still very expensive, but will be something to watch this year, I think.

 

The thing to watch for is also beam angle - many LEDs are quite narrow, giving an apparent light increase.

 

At the moment, I still have some FOH truss spots - 750W zoom profiles. At the moment, economics tell me these can't yet be replaced by the LED version at a price I can afford - but it will come soon.

 

Wash lights, even the narrow and beam versions too are bright enough. The optics of the 90W spots I just bought give bright and sharp images - even on very complex spirograph style gobos, and these in laser green have the punch to travel well.

[timsabre]

The optics of the 90W spots I just bought give bright and sharp images - even on very complex spirograph style gobos, and these in laser green have the punch to travel well.

 

(Sorry to derail the thread, but interested...) So do these have RGB light source or white? Nearly all the LED spot movers I am seeing use white LED with dichro colour filters, presumably due to the problems of getting an even coloured beam from an RGB source.

[paulears]

The spots have dichroic which work well, and the beams have 4 colour LED clusters, those square one - my fault for talking about two different types at the same time. The 90W spots have two gobo wheels, one with replaceable rotating gobos and another which is a simple disk with punched static gobos.