FEATURE | L IGHT I NG SPEC I AL
COOLING
Building LED lights is not quite all about cooling, but it’s a big issue. It’s possible to build a lot of interesting lights that’ll achieve spectacular things, but harder to make them last. Luminys’ LED strobes, for instance, are essentially a wall of tiny emitters, but they can operate only as strobes. Overheated LEDs lose efficiency and suffer colour and brightness changes, and wear out fast. It’s not clear if Cineo’s Reflex R15 is the first light to use liquid cooling, but it’s unlikely to be the last. The cooling techniques used in lights are often broadly equivalent to those used in other electronics and evaporation cooling tubes have certainly been used before. About the only concern this raises is of mechanical reliability; concern over the prospect of a leaky cooling loop
ROSCO It’s also time to confront the reality that many of these lights – certainly anything that offers colour mixing – are computers, and their software is crucial. DMG Lumière has announced version 2.0 of its Mix software, which adds emulation of more gels from owner Rosco, selection of the emulated light source behind those gels, and an XY colour selection mode. The company is also promoting Mixbook, a sort of electronic gel swatch book that allows users to preview colours. The idea of selecting colours using X and Y coordinates on a chart is gaining ground perhaps because there’s a demand for a way to match lighting across manufacturers. Given that the charts involved make assumptions about the colour sensitivity of a notional human observing the light, there’s no guarantee that this sort of Overheated LEDs lose efficiency and suffer colour and brightness changes
matching will ever be quite perfect for cameras, but it should make a good basis for fine adjustment. Generating bright party colours is a factor particularly familiar to Quasar Science, whose early success with fluorescent tube replacements has led to development of much more advanced lights. Quasar showed its 23in and 46in Double Rainbow tubes at the BSC show, which respectively have 24 or 48 individually controllable areas to produce animated effects. A hundred watts of LED light in something around the size of a four-foot fluorescent tube is dazzling – and then it starts to do tricks. QUASAR Much as Quasar has been known for tube- style lights and colour effects, its intentions bring us full circle. The company is reportedly looking to create larger lights – it
is not totally unreasonable. If we want powerful LED hard light, though, this is what it’s going to take.
uses the phrase ‘HMI replacement’ – which might fit the same categories as the big point-source and spacelight replacements. It’s still not clear that there will ever be a plausible LED-based alternative to, say, the venerable 18K HMI. Still, the early adopter tax is gradually withdrawing from LED lights, and serious colour quality issues are largely a solved problem. There are few earths left to shatter in this field, particularly at the entry level. It’ll be the high end to watch from here on out.
38 DEF I N I T ION | MARCH 2020
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