So, i contacted my usual supplier, and he said he had a few american DJ units (8 units), just really to experiment with. He wasn't impressed enough to buy any more. He did say that he would buy more, if i was willing to rent them.
I managed to find photometric data for his units so i could compare. http://www.americandj.com/pdffiles/P64-LED-PHOTOMETRICS.pdf Even after accounting for transmission losses through gel media on a conventional instrument, they still loose, big time! I would need hundreds to light even a small show.
The better quality units seem like they have similar light output. i found an article on the Weidamark website, but the impression i got was the rest look brighter then the Am Dj, because they are narrower beamed. The Weidamark units seem a little better, but not 10x better, which would be about how much i'd need to be practical.
In my opinion, it sounds like LED technology has a few years left to go, before it becomes practical for this application.
Oh well. I guess i'll have to take a walk through the space, and see if i can "find" some more power for conventional units.
Again depends on the application, if you take a high saturated gel the light transmitted will be far less than the full RGB lux level. In this case, using several of them MIGHT be close to other alternatives. IMO the more saturated the color you need, the better the LED's work. If for instance you wanted to have 3 different gels selected, and you compared 6 led's vs all of which could be set to the same "gel" and compared that to say 1 par with the same saturated gel, the comparison looks more favorable. considering the obvious advantage of being able to alter the color on the fly for all 6 of the led's vs a fixed gel.
Certainly when led performance goes up several orders of magnitude the decision will be simpler
Sharyn
So it seems that we are agreeing that LED pars are great for color as long as the throw isn't too great. However, you need something else for white. So the idea of just buying a rig of LED's for power consumption purposes has a serious flaw in it if you want anything close to bright white light out of them. So for DJ type operations they are great... even the cheap ones. For concert applications they are good as long as you have some other white light to assist. It's when you get around to fully theatrical applications they get really problematic because you need so much more white light on stage and you either run into too much white light from other instruments washing the LED's out or you can't get enough white light from the LED's to be useful.I made the saturated gel point in another LED topic, and I think that this is the main thing that LED's are good at. Even R41 (salmon, a relatively "light" color in contrast to something like congo blue) only has 24 percent transmittancy.
Throw in some 500W pars or fresnels with R05 or R16 for the warm/neutral pieces, and then use the LED pars for the pieces that require the saturated colors.
You are right on Sharyn about saturated color being the strength of LED's. That's also why it's really hard to get any useful photometric data on LED's. Yeah the lumen output is way lower... but which color are you talking about. Throw some R 382 "Congo Blue" and it's .56% transmission rate in a monster like a Source 4 par and it's going to be hurting to be visible over the rest of the lights in the rig. So if the color can be achieved by the instrument in question (which is a whole other topic)... the LED can really kick butt in the deep saturated colors.
As far as range of color mixing goes, this again is where the Selador rules. They don't just use RGB they use SEVEN colors of LED's. So the range of colors is much greater. The subtle tones of white are much better. You can mix a 3200 degree white vs. a 5000 degree white. They also go way deeper into the saturated colors than other instruments. But again, there's a big price tag attached.
It's a really fascinating topic and I'm looking forward to 5 years from now when they are producing 5 Watt, 10 Watt, or even higher LED's that blow away this whole discussion... Then when we finally get the LED Ellipsoidal we have a whole new revolution to deal with.
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