Lighting

Lighting is not just a matter of interior or exterior illumination. Light sources are needed everywhere: in homes, offices, public institutions like schools, hospitals and banks, in bars and restaurants, in discos and theaters and outdoors as well. But the place where lighting takes its most spectacular form is the showbiz industry. Here, the lights that set designers use is for enhancing the atmosphere and creating a special mood for the audience. Light effects like strobe lights and color changes are not accidental. These people know their business.

The entertainment industry needs special light sources for stage lighting, television and other special events: it needs high power luminaries, controllable light fixtures and special light control technologies. For television and film, this light needs special features as well: cameras require flicker free illumination. The standard luminary for stage lighting consists of a high power lamp mounted in a robust housing a socket and a reflector. The designer created this light source especially to be mounted in places such as overhead or vertical pipes, walls, ceilings or floors. There are three basic types of light sources for staging: floodlights, spotlights and projectors. These three families are assisted by LED technologies that introduce standard LED light sources and LED video panels for exclusive light effects as well.

The typical light sources for staging need wattage from 50 to over 10000 watts. To create such powerful lights that are completely dimmable and controllable, special technologies are employed. While the SSL (solid state lighting) technology might provide for effective solutions, the incandescent technology still used is rather inefficient because such lamps use most of the energy to produce heat.

Television and cinematography use HID and fluorescent lamps, because they are more efficient than tungsten lights. Yet the industry needs more flexible lights that are not only energy efficient, but controllable as well. The solution seems to come from the SSL-LED industry. In March 2006 Nichia broke the 100-lm/M barriers for a white LED. With this discovery, the LED industry can now easily compete with its traditional counterparts. In 2005 for a LED to compete directly with fluorescent lights at least 70 lm/W were needed. Today Nichia and other important manufacturers hope to go even further and improve the LEDs to achieve 150 lm/W per device. And this will happen sooner than we expect. After all, the LED industry never ceases to amaze us.

Stage lighting, although an application area where high power light sources are needed, still takes advantage of the flexibility and controllability of the LED technology. Companies like Barco and Martin Light have developed lighting fixtures that surpass our expectations. These fixtures can be controlled via DMX512 light mixing consoles, or respond to special computer software. But we don’t see LEDs in projectors so often. We see large video LED walls instead, mood panels or accent lights. Yet, these are enough to prove that LEDs are making their way into the stage lighting application area.