LED Shoot Out

Very Very nice. I love it when you do post like these. Lets see some movers! haha.
sincerely,

Would you like to see a PS575 IE vs DS575 E then? I can do that for you next week after this show I am working on this week.

Next time I have a big show I can try and do like mover vs like mover. I have seen/done PS700 CMY vs Mac 700 before, but didn't take photos. I also did Impression vs PS 575 IE and have photos of that.

I can also ask a few friends to borrow some things like Studio Spot 250s and PS250s after I pick up a few DS250s that I want/need since I am doing more and more college large scale parties/national acts.

whatever you can do would be great. ill soon be getting two of the Design spot 300E's. I'll take some photos of those!
sincerely,

on second thought post the impression pics. even on the elation forums too. Thanks serra!

That's about as fair of a shootout as we're gonna see on here.

The strange thing is that the Par56 LED is showing up so blue. Not to question too much, but I wonder what filtering the camera may have been doing. Then again, maybe those blues are overpowering in that fixture.

Overall, it's apparent the 56 LED couldn't "hang" with the rest.

None actually. Was a Cannon 8MP camera with quality and resolution set to the highest.

As you can see in the 'white' photos, the ParNel looks white, or slightly amber like it should since the color temperature is 3050k. For some reason, the P56 was pretty much always blue in hue. When I tried to match the color temperature of the S4, once the blue got to a certain intensity, the light turned too amber. Adding the slightest bit of blue back in again, it turned blue. Very strange, but the other P56s I got with the order all do the same thing color wise, so its not just a bad fixture.

This is also very strange since green is suppose to be the strongest color and red the weakest color on the P56. With that in mind, I would expect a more cyan looking white, instead it was blue, blue, or blue. I will have to get it out and look at it in more detail when I get the chance. I was also using the Hog's color wheel to do this, which means 0-360 degrees of Hue selection with 0-100% for saturation. That is 36,461 color choices.

What Canon you using? I got an 8 megapixel S5IS, which seems to suit my needs. Then again, as we alll know by now, I'm an audio guy.

I am wondering if LED's work on "perception" rather than any other concept? Hear me out. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think I recall seeing on TV or reading that our eyes are most sensitive to green. Maybe that's why the green wasn't as bright.

Still, I tend to think more old mindset. "This color should this THIS color."

I think maybe the LED's need more "throw" so the different LED's can merge together to form that beam. But that can't totally be true since you're showing another LED and it seems to be doing just fine. I guess it's also a design thing.

You are on the right track. All lights have a color temperature from 0 to let's say 15000 Kelvin. This temperature represents what color a black body radiator would be at that temperature Kelvin, or simply put a piece of iron. 1500k is red, 2000k-3500k is orange to light amber, 4000k-4500k is pure white, 5000k to 8000k is light to slightly darker shades of blue, 10,000k being blue and 12,000k and up turning purple.

Now, pure white, the brightest output a light source can have, is between 4-4.5k. This is great for gels, because light is filtered evenly. Arc lamps tend to be 5-8k, slightly blue in nature. Because of this, they do blues well, but aren't so great at reds. Halogens are 2.5-3.2k (3.2k being a standard life HPL, one of the reasons it is such a bright, efficient lamp). They tend to do oranges and reds better then blues and purples.

Now the human eye actually reacts to blue the most. This is the reason when it is dark, we perceive things as blue. This is also the reason why when you think of night as a color, it is blue and also the reason why lighting designers in shows use blues to represent night. Most lights used during shows are still halogens. So perceived white is in the 3k range. Add something like a 7.5k arc source and it looks much brighter next to the halogen and blue in tint since 'white' is 3k now. For example, a 250w arc lamp puts out 20k lumen, a standard life HPL 750w has the same lumen output. The 250w arc looks 'brighter' do to perception. We absorb more blue, there for it seems brighter despite the fact it really isn't.

Now this is the same thing with a DS300 vs a DS575. The 575 lamp has a lower color temperature, so at short distances, the lamps appear to have similar outputs. However, drop the same color into both lights and you will then get the real story about which is outputting more light. Once color is added, our perception of white changes again and when can then see things for what they really are. Drop CTO in that 250w arc lamp and get the color temperature down to 3.2k and both sources will look the same intensity wise.

Another quick example, a friend on mine rented 2 of my PS575s while his PS250s were getting repaired. At first, he thought the intensity difference wasn't that much until it was long throw distances. But once he had them out and started putting color in them, he realized how much brighter the 575s really are over the 250s.