CharlesPapert
Director of Photography
Re: LED vs. Tungsten. I'm on the record as being a "Tungsten Guy", but LED's have come a long way(at least the higher end stuff). Looking back at my shoots over the last several months, and I hate to admit this, I have to go all the way back to June for the last time I pulled a tungsten instrument out of a case. Excluding HMI's, it's been mostly Astra's(in chimeras), Sola's and Hive's. I still do not use the Hive's on people, their preset 3200K is green, just like all of the other tests out there have shown. Hive needs to fix this with a firmware update. I can "dial it out" with the color mixing panel on the app, but you shouldn't have to. I have a client with a bunch of Litemats, but I wasn't overly impressed with them. At least not in the environment we were using them. Fidgety and fragile connections/cables and not enough output, especially vs. Astra's. Maybe the newer versions with the new connectors are better and if we were in a more controlled lighting environment....
There are still issues with certain instruments leaning to a color cast as you described. The important distinction is what kind of spectrum they are pushing overall, whether they are showing significant spikes or not. If not, you can generally leave on a specific correction gel and be fine (I rejected the Kino Celebs for a long time because they were magenta, but eventually was convinced to use them with 1/8 plusgreen and they were fine). If their output is spiky then you can't fix it with gels and they are to be avoided on faces.
Litemats are indeed an evolution--having used Literibbon almost since the beginning I'm used to their quirks, but they are improving past that phase, and it's super helpful to be able to strip them down and tape the bare emitters to a wall or ceiling of a car. And their light quality is solid.