Most importantly, they looked a ton more professional than the 5mm/10mm LED of the previous generation. These fixtures were bright, colorful and simple to set up. 1W and Larger LED’s – Moving Up In the Worldīack in 2006 or 2007, the production company I worked for made their first major investment in the Coemar Parlite – buying at least 60 of these fixtures over the next year or two. These units are inexpensive and look pretty good too – as long as you don’t point them at human skin! The good news is that the hey-day of these fixtures is pretty much gone, and the industry has moved on to build inexpensive versions of much high-quality LED fixtures. If you’re looking for specific fixtures, I’d suggest the Chauvet Slimpar 56 and Slimpar 64. However, these fixtures are still totally good for party uplighting, indoor architectural lighting, and stage/set lighting in venues where you don’t have cameras. And, depending on the quality of the emitters, you may have trouble mixing colors such as yellow, purple, and anything super-specific. Still, these fixtures were a step in the right direction and are still available through some manufacturers today.īecause you can see the individual diodes, I wouldn’t recommend using these for backlighting or anywhere that the audience can see the physical light source. They also were limited in the number of colors they could mix – you’d be lucky to get 8 visibly different hues! If you pointed a camera at them, they’d flicker like mad on screen, so this made them impractical for many productions. They didn’t look very good, the light output was horrible, but they didn’t suck up much power or heat up, so they got an in with DJ’s and party companies. I remember pretty clearly the first time I saw some of these in action. Some brands chose to put the LED’s in rows that matched by color, resulting in an uneven beam, while others put the emitters in seemingly random patterns that put out a much more even light!
The first types of LED’s to hit the stage lighting market were a big version of the little diodes that light up the power buttons and “on” lights in consumer electronics.įeaturing neat rows and rows of red, green and blue LED’s, early fixtures like these were fairly inexpensive. 5mm and 10mm LED’s – The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly There’s a smorgasbord of options on the market today, and the variety keeps growing as time moves forward.īelow, I want to explain to you all of the different types of LED fixtures, their best uses, and how you can use cheaper fixtures to your advantage without sacrificing quality.
While LED’s don’t generate a lot of infrared heat or heat which is in the light beam, LED’s do generate a lot of heat in the process of creating the light which needs to be whisked away from the diode itself. Other people despise them, and nearly everybody is confused about the differences between different types of LED’s and LED fixtures.
Today, this trendy light source has everyone talking. In the 50+ years since that first LED, technology has brought these tiny little “lightbulbs” a long way, to the point of breaking into the stage lighting industry in the last 10 years. While a LED outputs light, it is not a traditional “light bulb”, but rather an electronic component which generates when voltage passes through. The year 1961 brought the world the very first light emitting diode – what we now commonly call the LED.