Thomas Bishop wrote on Wed, 16 February 2011 09:52 |
It all depends on what you're trying to accomplish. Incandescents aren't going anywhere. The look and brightness just cannot be achieved with LED's (at least anything even remotely affordable). I have built a rig based on Source 4's and 36x3w tri color LED's for front lighting of bands and am pretty happy with it. The S4's provide the white and the LED's give a nice bright color saturation. Keep in mind this is for concert work, theatre is a completely different animal and I don't think we're really there yet with LED's for theatre work. Longer throws means tighter beam angles and brighter light, both hard to get out of most of today's (affordable) LED's. Another reason to stick with 120k rigs is sheer coverage. Sure, you can get any color out of an LED, but you still need a lot of them to cover a stage. So maybe your double hung 120k rig turns into single hung. That's still a lot of LED's, a lot of focusing, and a lot of money to invest. Yes, uplighting with LED's is the way to go. I've been doing quite a bit of uplighting recently and I'd hate to imagine trying to pull it off with par cans. The ability to change color is a huge selling point for my clients and one that sets me apart from the competition. |
Silas Pradetto wrote on Wed, 16 February 2011 20:36 |
I think, once you factor in dimming, socapex, trussing, feeder, and the cost of the fixtures, LEDs are going to win these days. |
Thomas Bishop wrote on Wed, 16 February 2011 23:21 | ||
I figured someone would bring this up, and it's true, but only if you're looking at buying starting from 0. Most established companies have dimmers, soco, etc, so investing in LED's is basically starting over. |