[gafftaper]

Back to the original question, fine tuned a bit... LED's can produce colors with much more color saturation (deeper, richer, darker) than incandescents/discharge lamps with CMY filters... or just plain old gel. On the flip side, LED's have a harder time creating as good of a white light and they just aren't as bright.

If I had an unlimited budget and wanted to wash a cyc with brilliant color, LED's win hands down. HOWEVER, LED's are dramaticlly more expensive at this point so it's out of the range of most theaters today to even consider.

If you want to wash a cyc with LED lights, bright enough that it doesn't get washed out by the other lighting on stage, you need to cover it with both top and bottom rows of instruments and you need LED instruments covering about 75% of the cyc's width. So a 50 foot cyc needs 50x.75= 37.5 feet of LED strips TOP AND BOTTOM... That's 75 feet of LED strip lights that cost around $1500 a foot (when you add the cost of diffusers, mounting hardware etc...). 75x$1500=$112,500. Who has that kind of cash laying around?

OR you can just use some Cyc lights and gel. In the future as LED's become more powerful and less expensive, they will be a great option, but for now it's an option only for big concert tours, Broadway, and Vegas.