FEATURE | L IGHT I NG SPEC I AL
The big news from Cineo is a big hardlight, the 1500W Reflex R15. It’s not absolutely unprecedented in terms of sheer power – Mole-Richardson has had LED fresnels (or at least fresnel-style lights) of this scale for a while – but it’s an early example of an open-faced PAR with proper PAR-style beam width control. That control is implemented as a series of nine LED ring segments around the central emitter, so beam width is both solid-state and independent of brightness. Crucially, the R15 is liquid-cooled, lending the transparent emitter cap the look of a snowglobe as tiny bubbles chase around inside. The company’s claim that the light equates to a 6K HMI is bold; LED lighting is more controllable than HMI, with linear dimming and variable colour temperature, but not massively more efficient. Either way, it’s a big light. 1500W of LEDs is a lot, and the PAR optical assembly is an efficient way to throw photons around.
UNDERSTANDING COLOUR QUALITY
Colour quality is still a major point of competition between manufacturers
LED lighting was probably launched some time before it was ready, and early colour problems provoked an awareness of colour quality that perhaps hadn’t previously existed. Colour quality is still a major point of competition between manufacturers, even though most lights are now good enough to do most jobs. Systems of measuring colour quality are often less well understood. CRI is inadequate for office lighting, let alone movies; it relies on test colours that are so pale and unsaturated that it’s easy to miss problems. TLCI, the television lighting consistency index, models a television camera rather than a cinema camera, although anything with an acceptable TLCI is likely to be usable for most things. TM-30 includes even sterner assessments, often including a hue wheel chart showing which colours are lacking in the light. Finally, the Academy’s SSI, the spectral similarity index, compares two spectrums mathematically. None is perfect, and the only way to completely understand a light’s behaviour is to look at a chart of its spectrum.
34 DEF I N I T ION | MARCH 2020
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