LED fixtures are all the rage these days. There's been a lot of discussion in the HOW market about lower cost LED fixtures; we thought it worth a brief discussion that there are good reasons to look at what's happening at the higher end of the market when looking to add LED luminaires for your church.
LED lighting fixtures grew out of a simple design—gang multiple LEDs into a PAR-style fixture. At first they used red, green, and blue LEDs to make a washlight. These were fairly simple to design and assemble, and low-end manufacturers knocked off the lights pretty quickly. While LEDs don't produce as much heat as a conventional tungsten lamp of similar wattage, they do produce heat and many of the cheap knockoffs don't have adequate heat sinks to preserve the LED light engine's life. LEDs have a long life span if properly designed. The life ratings of 50,000 or more hours are for individual LED dies. When they are ganged together, poor assembly or high heat can shorten that life considerably. Also, while LEDs don't die, they do fade away at about 50% of their life and get dimmer over time. These units are cheap, and the old adage—“you get what you pay for” applies here. Cheaper units also tend to use cheaper LEDs, resulting in poor color-matching unit to unit.
Increasing the output and widening the useful application is the goal of all LED fixture manufacturers. “As advancements in LED technology and materials progress, the efficiency factor will increase,” says Marc Kaye, COO with LED fixture manufacturer AAdyn Tech. “In conventional fixtures, about 90% of the energy that goes into them is wasted as heat; they've reached their physical limitations.” Matthew Armendariz-Kerr, associate entertainment market manager with Electronic Theatre Controls (ETC), agrees, “The future is really still in the realm of increasing output and color rendering. LEDs continue to get brighter and better, and this will continue until they can truly be an adequate replacement for incandescent sources.”
Both manufacturers are planning for the future. Armendariz-Kerr explains, “ETC is working on a variable white light Source Four LED for studio/broadcast work, as well as improving LED lighting for large flat surfaces like cycloramas. The No. 1 thing ETC strives for in our LED innovation is performance; the quality of the light output is of the utmost importance to us.” AAdyn Tech products are aimed mostly at the image-capture market, so they are developing units for “network television, professional sports, motion-picture or video capture work,” says Kaye. “We've devoted the past three years of research and development into creating the highest quality white-light based LED instruments possible.”