DEFINITION June 2019

FEATURE | L IGHT I NG UPDATE

RIGHT The Fiilex Q8 Travel bi-colour LED light is optimised for controllability

without catching fire. That’s some clever design, and at $3000 (£2300) it works out to around £7.20 a watt. Fiilex also offers the Matrix II RGBW, a simple, almost open-faced 320-watt “punch light” clearly designed to illuminate bounce or diffusion, but with full colour mixing. LITEPANELS LED lighting was first popularised as flat panels with arrays of individually lensed emitters creating a sort of projecting soft light. Litepanels remains a leading manufacturer of flat panels, and its Gemini range was first discussed at the end of 2017. The upscale 2x1 (the numbers are, roughly, size in feet) offers full colour mixing and draws up to 350W in competition with things like Arri’s Skypanel S60C. LED lighting is popular because it can often be battery powered, and while it’s theoretically possible to battery-power anything, 350W is a very large load for average batteries. The recently announced 1x1 (again, roughly size in feet) is a 200W light, representing a slightly better power- to-size ratio than its larger cousin and is slightly more practical for battery power. At £1950, the Gemini 1x1 offers about £9.75 a watt, or 60% the cost of a comparable Arri. ARRI Arri's Skypanel range now runs from the S30 through the S60, the S120 (approximating the layout of a Kino- Flo) and all the way up to the enormous S360-C. Kilowatt-plus power draws are

LED lighting was first popularised as flat panels with arrays of individually lensed emitters creating a sort of projecting soft light

doesn’t look like a Star Trek hand prop – it’s built of steel plate and bolts, like the lights of the 20th century, and gives an impression of simplicity and toughness that’s sometimes missing from LEDs. Cineo lists the LB800 at $11,000 (£8500,) or about £10.50 a watt. At the more compact end of the scale, BB&S has just launched the full colour mixing version of its Area 48 series. The company has been known for very high colour quality and was among the first to start talking about the improved Television Lighting Consistency Index, or TLCI, a more exacting standard of colour quality measurement than CRI. The Area 48 Colour is built on much the same platform as the company’s earlier lights, and is rated at 160W. With its roughly 14.10in silhouette, it’s one of the denser lights available in terms of watts per size and weight, though at $3295 (£2500), or nearly £16 a watt, it's not the least expensive option. It does, however, offer supremely good colour quality in both colour and white modes. With a product range including the 180-watt Force 7 backend for ETC Source Four barrels and lenses, as well as the tube-style Pipeline, BB&S can cover a lot of bases.

a reasonably recent option in the world of LED lighting, and the 360’s 1500W represents a lot of light. The Skypanel range is also notable for being available both in full colour mixing and, in RP-suffix models, remote-phosphor. Keeping the sensitive phosphor away from the heat of the LEDs makes for longer life and better colorimetry, though it precludes tuneable colour and is offered only in -30 and -60 products. Recent months, for Arri, have really been about the Alexa LF Mini, but the big S360 remains almost uniquely powerful. At something over £15,000, each watt of output costs about £10. Cineo, which has as history of producing respected remote-phosphor panels, has recently focussed on its collaboration with NBCUniversal for the Lightblade. The first Lightblades were, as the name hints, in similar form factor to fluorescent tubes, and can be banked to create a 4x4ft, one-kilowatt array that retains the individual tubes’ ability to mix colours and can create chasing effects, perhaps to simulate the pass of light for a studio-bound car interior. Similar power levels and capabilities are packed into half the space in the LB800, a 900W light that’s noticeable because it

60 DEF I N I T ION | JUNE 20 1 9

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