White light isn’t just white light anymore

One designer’s white light is not necessarily another designer’s white light. This is especially true in television and film lighting where color temperature and color balance play an important part in lighting, particularly when lighting the talent. Depending on the studio and what other lighting is being used – HMI, moving lights with an arc source, fluorescents, tungsten halogen or daylight – designers may choose to have their white light at 3,200K for a tungsten match, or 5,600K for matching daylight.

TV lighting designers, film cinematographers and gaffers have until recently been using LEDs primarily for lighting scenery, especially for lightboxes or translucent panels. Most of this lighting is diffused and uses the traditional red, green and blue (RGB) LEDs. As they begin to incorporate LEDs into their designs for lighting talent, they need to mix to white. RGB LED units have been, for the most part, unsuccessful in this application. It’s hard, if not impossible, to mix to a clean white with just the three colors. More recently, manufacturers have added amber and white LEDs into the RGB mix. Some TV lighting designers find the amber LEDs help get closer to a useable white for lighting talent, but this is still not an ideal solution.

The new Selador® Desire™ Studio range consists of three fixtures — the Desire Studio Daylight, the Desire Studio Tungsten, and the Desire Studio HD. The Desire Studio luminaires are designed specifically for television and film applications and are intended to replace HMI or tungsten fixtures, as well as bulky fluorescent lights.

Daylight match
The Desire Studio Daylight unit is designed as a replacement or complement for HMI daylight fixtures. This is a good model to choose if you have a lot of arc-based automated lighting that already has a high color temperature. With its design, the Studio Daylight luminaire provides large quantities of daylight white light while drawing very little power. The Studio Daylight unit, with cool white LEDs, has a nominal color temperature of 5,600K. When you need a daylight balance, the Studio Daylight fixture is the light to use.

Tungsten match
The Desire Studio Tungsten luminaire is designed as a replacement for tungsten units in a studio, wherever you need a fill of warm, white color. Again, with a large quantity of the same LED emitters, the Studio Tungsten fixture is designed to provide a large amount of warm white output, with a very low power draw. The Studio Tungsten unit, has a nominal color temperature of 3,200K.

Both the Studio Daylight and Studio Tungsten luminaires consist of all white LEDs, using the new high-efficacy Rebel ES LEDs from Luxeon. ES stands for energy saving, which puts out more light with less power. The two models, Studio Daylight and Studio Tungsten, are geared to designers and cinematographers who want a specific color temperature and don’t want to have to take the time and energy to mix to that temperature. Both models provide large quantities of white light, while using only 140 watts of power. The initial testing for the Studio Daylight and Tungsten units shows outputs of 5,000-6,000 lumens.

High-definition white light
The Studio HD luminaire introduces a whole new concept in white LED studio lighting: high-definition white light. The Studio HD unit brings the Selador x7 color thinking to the studio, where white light is in demand and color can be an annoyance. By combining small quantities of colored LEDs with a mixture of warm and cool white LEDs, the Studio HD fixture produces a white light with an adjustable range of color temperatures from 800-20,000K. Designers will appreciate the five additional colors that fill in a majority of the “spectrum gaps.” The Studio HD luminaire also allows you to vary the tint of the light with easy green and magenta tint-control for color balancing. The unit’s strengths include spectral fullness that allows for much better color rendering and color matching than white-only LED units, color temperature variability, and higher light output than a standard ETC Selador color-mixing unit. During development, a lot of time was spent with TV lighting designers and cinematographers testing different LED color combinations to come up with the right mix to enhance and refine the white-light output of the Studio HD model.

Variable beam sizes
The Desire Studio units are available in two sizes: the D40 with 40 emitters, which accepts standard 7.5-inch diameter Source Four® PAR™ accessories; and the D60 with 60 emitters, which uses custom-sized accessories. The Studio range has a native field angle of 18°. Round field diffuser lenses are available in 25°, 35°, 45°, and 75° spreads. Oblong diffuser lenses are available in 20°x40°, 30°x70° and 35°x80° spreads. These lenses change the field angle, and soften and diffuse the output of the fixtures.

The D40 Studio XT™ is rated for all-weather exterior use. You can take XT fixtures on location, use them to light building facades or landscaping, permanently mount them outside, or just light talent dancing in the rain.

The Desire Studio range is designed to work for all types of production. Units feature DMX-In, -Out and -Thru, so you can set up your data network and have all of the lights controlled from a console. The range also includes full RDM capability, so the units can send status updates to the console, and be quickly and easily discovered on the data network. The RDM capability also allows changes to the fixtures’ configuration from the console.

If you prefer, you can control the unit in Stand Alone Mode directly at the light, where you can address and control the unit via the buttons and LCD window on the fixture. Using these onboard controls, the fixture can be activated and controlled without a DMX console. You can also adjust the color temperature, the green/magenta tints, and set the intensity of the light.

Perhaps the best feature of the Desire Studio line is that designers can work with the range in the manner they are most comfortable, rather than adapting to a new way of working in order to accommodate a new lighting product.