FEATURE | NEW L IGHT I NG
RIGHT The Hive Super Hornet 575 is a small and light LED
Orbiter, but does some very similar things, with a very similar accessory selection. Hive lists a price of $5,262.11 on its website. How that compares to an Orbiter remains to be seen, and the two differ in many ways: the Orbiter is a unified device incorporating a large LCD display and controller, while the Super Hornet is a clean cylindrical design with separate power controller and head. The Super Hornet has no weather resistance, though, perhaps as a consequence, it is a lot smaller and lighter. Medium-sized LED hard lights, then, are just starting to nibble at the toes of HMI, while simultaneously pushing out of the area where they can realistically be battery powered. Meanwhile, something much bigger is happening in the higher-power world of big studio lighting. CREAMSOURCE SPACEX At IBC2019, Creamsource showed its SpaceX light, which is designed either to drive a conventional spacelight skirt or, with additional optics, to act as a ‘punch light’, perhaps to drive diffusion or provide a backlight. The SpaceX is perhaps a replacement for the existing Creamsource Sky, which accepted a degree of bulk and 23kg weight in return for fanless operation. The SpaceX is smaller and lighter at 18kg thanks to active cooling. At 1200W, SpaceX is an absolute beast and, as with most high-power LED applications, it uses a cluster of six emitter modules. There’s full colour mixing, support for unique accessories such as the Flashbandit synchronisation device, and Creamsource’s traditionally sturdy and attractive approach to the mechanical engineering. The control system offers CIE xy colour selection. And, importantly, it’s not a fortune: at $6500, the price per watt is hugely competitive. LED spacelights are efficient, sure, and that’s especially relevant where expensive studio power is concerned. Unlike the little half-kilowatt hard lights, though, they’re also lightweight, and the reduced power consumption makes cabling and rigging
vastly easier. That, in turn, makes power distribution smaller, lighter and cheaper, and requires fewer people over less time to set up. The driving force behind a lot of this is not just more efficient light. In the end, products just such as SpaceX, and related products from Sumolight and Lightstar, represent one part of the market; the smaller hardlights represent another. Both, though, are striving for power. It’s hard to tell whether LED will eventually scale up big enough to replace absolutely every other competing technology, but that certainly seems to be the trajectory we’re on in late 2019.
WAYS OF COLOUR
It’s no big secret that putting a red, green and blue LED together doesn’t actually create white light. It may create something that looks a bit like white light, but viewed on a colour meter, it’s still clearly three spikes on a spectrum. Point that light at something that reflects only – say – bright yellow light, and things won’t look right. LED lights can be phosphor converted, where a blue LED causes a red or green phosphor to glow, which creates a broader, less spiky spectrum, but any reasonable full colour-mixing LED light will still need to use four, five, six or even more channels, including one or two whites, for good performance. With every manufacturer using a different approach, it’s often possible to make two lights look and work the same – but measure the actual output spectrum, and things can be quite different.
46 DEF I N I T ION | NOVEMBER 20 1 9
Powered by FlippingBook