5600K LED is the way of the future?

MattinSTL said:
As far as I could tell there were more LED lights than any other product.

There were only a couple that impressed me as "original designs" because of their small, sealed housing, but those left me wondering how long until the total output goes down significantly.

90% of the other lights were "me too" products where you'd need a controlled space to see how good the really were.
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Could you tell us more about these impressed ones ? Just brand or other information. Thanks for your reply.
 
throwing CTB on a 3200 lamp is more efficient than putting CTO on a 5600k lamp. But color temperature of a lamp is also a choice. I mix my color temperatures for contrast and depth all the time.

Im just happy to see more lensed LED fixtures. I hate the "panel" LEDs, the quality of light they give off is so artificial I find. The only instance of that type of light in a real world setting is large computer screens.

But even I'll admit, they are dam handy on doc shoots. But do I think they are "the future", probably not. Its just another tool.
 
Remote Phosphor LED lights are the future IMO. You get all the power saving benefits of LED lighting with none of the drawbacks like multiple source shadows, inconsistent color, and low CRI ratings.

Instead of putting phosphor inside the individual LED in order to achieve the proper color temperature, some smart folks are now putting the phosphor on a substrate (piece of plastic) that can be placed in front of the source LEDs. When the light hits the substrate it excites the phosphor which has been spread out evenly throughout the substrate. There is zero light loss and color temperature can be adjusted by simply changing out substrates. You can dim these lights without any color shift as well. It really is quite clever. These lights are far stronger than traditional LED panels. I couldn't look directly at them when at full power :)

I'm surprised there isn't more talk about these lights after NAB. Here are two links to the companies I found selling remote phosphor lights at NAB this year.

http://brothers-sons.dk/area-48-soft/
http://www.cineolighting.com
 
Panels have their place and i use them accordingly but to say one type of light, regardless what is driving it, is the future is silly.

Equally silly is to debate what color temp lights are best. What units to use daylight/tungsten is based upon the situation at hand. Anyone lighting any kind of motion picture should be prepared for either.
 
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I think it is much safer to say that in the future, we will have more units that are tunable between tungsten and daylight settings (preferably more, like 2500 to 8000 degrees), and hopefully full-spectrum. One of the advantages to more sensitive cameras is that you can work with the available light in a given environment; a practical lamp may now serve as a key light rather than having to be augmented (and better dynamic range means that photographing said practical doesn't result in a blowout). Thus it's not efficient to have to go through a practical location and swap out every bulb to daylight, unless there is a specific reason for this such as a shot that carries from exterior to interior.

Until we have affordable new-tech versions of the wide array of tungsten units that are a part of my standard request package, I'll keep opting to shoot at 3200 for interiors. I need the control of the various flavors of fresnels, lekos, pars etc. and right now to replace those with LED versions would cost significantly more (and many are not color accurate enough). I use plenty of LED units but I prefer those that can dial in color temp whenever possible as they are the most flexible (the latest version of hybrid Literibbon from Litegear is fantastic).

As a slight side note--existing environmental lighting is something that itself is a moving subject. While I don't see household lighting shifting to daylight balance any time soon, we may begin to see more of this in commercial spaces. And the classic orange sodium-vapor streetlight look will soon become a dated reference, as streetlights are turned over to LED versions. I'm a little horrified at what this will mean since those have quite a cold and clinical look to them in comparison, but eventually our cultural concept of what city night looks like will come to expect this, so we'll have no choice but to adapt.
 
I have a white paper I authored a while back. I can post a link here. It talks about LED Color Blending. Originally for environmental lighting but obviously, the concept took hold with Video lighting. Remote Phosphor LED sound interesting, i will read up on it. What you will notice in 'nature' is that natural lighting is a 'base' color temperature with zillions of influences from all around ( in many cases, esp urban landscape) . The homogenous LED panels ( or Flou tubes) Alone are a mistake. People are not using them correctly. Just too busy to write up a tutorial etc right now. Who knows. Some day I may get some help around here.
If someone wants to play Protoge, I'm willing to play mentor for some experiments.
 
squig said:
So I'm not the only 4500k freak after all.
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I would think so. Haha. I try it from time to time. But I shoot in natural light, so maybe I am even more a freak?


What do you mean by shooting at 4500? are you in a controlled situation, or are you mixing? What is the feel it is giving you?

Thanks,
 
I think the old way of using a colour temperature has really had it's day, and we need a better system to denote 'quality' of colour. Has anyone ever found an LED that looks to the camera like sunlight? People seem nowadays to be trying to use colour temperature in the camera like colour balance in the edit/grade. The colour temperature, with continuous spectrum lighting did mean we had something solid and repeatable to deal with - often without actually needing to see it, but now the 5600K label seems to actually mean very little! White, blue, green - all seem to be 5600K!!!
 
I was hoping not to have to go 'deeper' but I will go a bit deeper.
For the longest time there really have been two key metrics for denoting the quality of light, particularly in the spectrum visible to humans and cameras.
The oldest is color temperature ala Sir Kelvin.( please google for more). The second set of metrics is newer and that's CRI which is derived from the LaCie scale.
( please google for more). Color Temperature was a great ballpark metric and still helps to narrow artificial lighting strategies in relation to ambient illumination.
Indeed, the more modern 'lamps' such as Flourescent, Mercury-vapor, Metal Halide, Sodium Vapor and LED's (of ALL stripe) have truly complicated nomenclature as well as the burden of the Lighting Director.
I fought hard in the mid 90's for LED makers as well as flashlight makers to really get down to a true depiction of what thier products produced. I had some success. The key victory is evident in how manufactures of the LED emitters for example, specify their 'binned' ( sorted ) LEDs.
Thus- LED's from the major players such as Lumileds/Phillips, Cree etc. will specify the CRI, Lumen output at source and the bin-code for their products.
Now the Bad News.
Product manufacturers' marketing people, simply revert back to the old Kelvin scale to 'simplify' the spec for consumers.
In my research I discovered that a homogenous array of same binned emitters produced an unpleasantly flat and narrow spectrum, whereas in nature, the spectrum that is typically referred to as "Daylight" is often a blend of several colors that once interacting with objects in our world then give it better form.
So my solution was to blend various LED emitter types to break up the nasty homogenous panels. At its simplest, the garden variety 5,000K/3,400K dual light fixtures with variable output as the basic result.
In my ideal solution, RGB emitters are a more sophisticated option.
Personally I like mixing lights in a scene to create depth anyway. Bluish background, Neutral fills, warmish mains and colored rims all add up to a more natural strategy for lighting.
The key takeaway is to build lighting from the foundation of ambient and ignore the rules about 'the way of the future' since the future is here ;)
 
Zephyrnoid said:
Personally I like mixing lights in a scene to create depth anyway. Bluish background, Neutral fills, warmish mains and colored rims all add up to a more natural strategy for lighting.
The key takeaway is to build lighting from the foundation of ambient and ignore the rules about 'the way of the future' since the future is here ;)
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Designing lighting from existing ambience is a classic scheme for naturalistic lighting, but I wouldn't necessarily include that first recipe into that catch-all , which is a more stylized form of lighting. In particular, colored rims are the least likely contribution to a natural look, unless there are similarly colored sources present in the background. Nothing wrong with any of it, but I wouldn't lump that together under the category of "natural".
 
CRI doesn't really seem to work though, does it? Here in Europe, we have experts like the BBC's Alan Roberts who has been working on the EBU's LED project developing the TLCI - the Television Lighting Consistency Index, which seems to be a much more reliable system. A starting point for further reading is in this link.

https://tech.ebu.ch/docs/r/r137.pdf
 
paulears said:
CRI doesn't really seem to work though, does it? Here in Europe, we have experts like the BBC's Alan Roberts who has been working on the EBU's LED project developing the TLCI - the Television Lighting Consistency Index, which seems to be a much more reliable system. A starting point for further reading is in this link.

https://tech.ebu.ch/docs/r/r137.pdf
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Oh Sorry. I didn't realize that the OP intended this thread to address TELEVISION lighting. I assumed it was about lighting for VIDEO, which is different. Though I found the paper you cited useful, it doesn't supplant the CIE color wheel for VIDEO lighting does it?
 
mcgeedigital said:
The original Red One sensor was ALOT better in 5600k light. Sonce the MX sensor it looks just at good in 3200k, imo.
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It doesn't look "just as good", it may look "good", but the noise floor is closer at hand when balanced to 3200 (in post, or on-camera, since RAW this makes no difference). You can't have an opinion about a technical fact. It's either correct or not. Generally color rendition is also less accurate at 3200 on any CMOS camera. Less accurate can be a good or a bad thing, it can look a way that you like while being technically "wrong", but noise floors and latitude are usually agreed upon - you want less noise, more latitude.
 
I think it's crazy not to have both color temps (native) The prices are so low these days, I couldn't imagine not owning 3200, and daylight rated lighting. I have grown to love the mix of the two when done nicely, it's very natural and realistic. Yes, gels are a must, but I just don't losing light if I don't have to, especially when I need it.
 
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