DEFINITION September 2019

H IGH - POWERED LEDS | FEATURE

A HIGHER POWER AS LED LIGHTING MATURES AND SPREADS ITS INFLUENCE IN THE INDUSTRY, THE LATEST MARKET SECTOR TO CONQUER IS HIGH-OUTPUT LIGHTING. WE LOOK AT THE LATEST INNOVATION

WORDS PH I L RHODES

T echnological progress is often slow enough to miss while it’s happening, but looking back, it’s clear that LED lighting is no longer a completely new field. Since the first tentative steps perhaps a decade ago, the colour quality problem largely has been solved, at least for plain white light, and power levels have risen high enough, at a few hundred watts, to handle most of the lighting that’s actually done for media production. A 200W LED is probably as bright as an 800W redhead, and a set of those was once sold for more or less every Betacam on the planet. In 2019, the subject is ever higher power, and the potential to bring the efficiency and convenience of LED to bigger set-ups. Jon Miller is founder and chief product officer at Hive Lighting, a company specialising in colour-mixing LED hard lights, who says that LED users are hungry for more. “The question for most people on set is: ‘Look, I get it, this tech is great, I understand why we’re moving there, I

A trade-off between efficiency and colour quality. It’s a bit like fast, cheap and good. Usually you get two out of three

understand why the controls are there, but I need a certain amount of output. Where’s my 10K, my M40, my M90?’” Miller’s perspective is informed by Hive’s background in point-source lighting; the company recently unveiled the 500W Super Hornet, with market-leading power- to-size ratio. He describes the engineerng challenges as “a trade-off between efficiency and colour quality”, adding: “It’s a bit like fast, cheap and good. Usually you get two out of three. If you want good colour quality and good efficiency, you can do it.

IMAGES (Top) Creamsource’s 1200W SpaceX. (Right) Hive’s new 500W Super Hornet

SEPTEMBER 20 1 9 | DEF I N I T ION 61

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