Why You Should Replace Your Old Lights with LED Fixtures

If you look on the website under Lighting, you will notice the category Continuous lighting, which is separate from strobe or flash lighting, which is most commonly used with still photography. Continuous here refers to lighting units that are not strobe units, and these are mostly used in film and video, as well as theater. Once, this type of lighting was dominated by tungsten and HMI fixtures for power and utility, and then fluorescents became popular for creating soft light. However, LED lighting has made tremendous inroads for all manner of productions, and it is no longer limited to just soft light.
Tungsten light is a full-spectrum light source, much like daylight, which makes them both unquestionably the best choices for filming, so why use any other sources? Daylight is powered by the sun, and that provides few options when shooting under bridges, or indoors, or at night, and tungsten lighting (also known as Quartz-Halogen) is inefficient and generates a great deal of heat. HMI and fluorescent lighting are “discontinuous” sources and are technically known as “correlated” light sources because they deliver an approximation of daylight or tungsten color temperature light. What this means is that unlike daylight and tungsten, which have a full spectrum of the wavelengths of visible light, HMI and Fluorescent lighting is missing frequencies from the spectrum from their output. A full spectrum is important for the proper rendition of skin tones, as well as colors. CRI (Color Rendering Index) was adopted from architecture and provides a rough guide as to how well a light source will render colors. The higher CRI rating, the more accurately a light source will render colors. Daylight and tungsten are both 100 CRI. LEDs are also correlated color temperature sources. However, LED technology is advancing rapidly, and the spectrum of light that LEDs can reproduce is becoming closer and closer to full spectrum.