any decent LEDs for practicals yet?

Gweilo66 said:
Keith, what fixture are you using the 3 ways?
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I've been popping it into just about any consumer table lamp and it seems to work. I'm not using these for key lights, mostly just practical replacements that can serve as cheap fill, accents or kicks. Fixtures that are on walls or ceilings that are driven by wall switches are just binary off/on, so these don't work so hot in there.
 
For my new film, "The Review - A Fatal Frame Fan Film", I used all Home Depot LED lighting with both Cree and Philips in both 2700K and 5000K versions at the highest wattage ratings I could get which was 90w, 100w, and 120w equivalents based on what bulb I was getting. The Philips were my hard lights as they didn't have any bulb covers or soft shielding on them and the Cree were my soft normal and fill lights due to their soft bulb shielding. The whole point of the project was to emulate and accentuate the natural lighting of my house. With all the tungsten bulbs on dimmers throughout the house, the 2700K Cree bulbs and occasional large Philips LED all matched nicely. I had tried some bulbs with kelvin values in the 3,000 levels but with LEDs that doesn't line up as closely with tungsten 3200K as you would think, which made 2700K a much better match, if just a touch on the light orange to yellow side but literally just a touch. Now, as far as white balancing goes, I treated it simply as either 3200K or 5500K. I know you're supposed to white balance every shot but keeping those two values just worked because I knew I would either be using daylight or tungsten and not once did I have a color correction issue with the project because of white balance. Now, if there was a tricky spot it was in selecting what flashlight I would use for the scary exploration scenes and that took some effort and I ultimately couldn't use any LED flashlights because they all either induced scan lines in the camera or were completely off temperature-wise, usually straight up blue or even green. Ultimately I used a heavy duty flashlight we had that ran on Surefire batteries and with my brother holding a bounce board that was the lighting setup for that and it was fine at 3200K. So, for practical purposes, I would say the current Cree and Philips bulbs do a great job and if there were any problems, it's with the quality of LED flashlight selection.

P.S. For the Cree 2700K bulbs, I tried to aim for the True Color ones.
 
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I've been using the ikea ledare bulbs as practicals. Pretty warm at 2700 but they end up looking nice and they're no fuss in color. I even have one bare bulb in my next short. Looks good.
 
Here's a quick un-scientific test of incandescent vs an older Ikea Ledare vs a Feit Electric Conserv-Energy bulb which claims a CRI of 92. I bought these in a 3 pack at Costco on a whim. I think they were around $12 or $15 for the 3-pack.

All shot on BMCC, white balance and exposures set via scopes on the white square. Lift was untouched, so contrast is side-effect of bulb brightness. Color checker card is old and beat to s*%t, but still provides a decent baseline for this test. Lens was a Contax Zeiss 35mm f/1.4

https://youtu.be/It8LVab_ZfQ

LED home lighting technology is definitely getting there.

I think Feit has discontinued the "conserv-energy" line. I believe this bulb is the replacement for the one I used here: http://www.feit.com/led-lamps/enhance_led_a-bulbs/bpagom800-927-led The spec sheet is the same, at least.

I'd like to test some of the new IKEA bulbs, particularly this one: http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/80306780/

1800 lumens out of 22 watts makes me want to rig up a ring of them.
 
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