Lighting for Worship

So I haven’t quite made it with that once a week thing I promised for new products. Sorry about that. Between the day job and some surgery my wife went through last week I haven’t been able to get there. Fortunately, she’s on the mend and I’ve got a little more time to work on my evening projects, like getting this site up and running.

So let’s talk about toys, shall we? I know it seems like everybody and their brother is making an LED product nowadays, and the ways that some people are integrating LEDs with video and other uses is pretty spectacular. Just check out YouTube for the videos of the LED stage from the Super Bowl that featured the new Hippotizer media server running through LED fixtures. Pretty amazing stuff. So over the next few weeks, we’ll look at several LED fixtures and what separates them from the field, as it were. With everybody making LEDs, it’s impossible for them to all be created equally, right? So I’m going to go over some of the fixtures, and what makes them different and what specific applications they are best used for.

The first unit we’re going to take a look at is the Spectra-Cyc by Altman Lighting. I got the chance to use these in a theatre show I lit back in September, and I was very pleasantly surprised at how bright they were, and blown away by how good the colors were. This is a real-deal cyc light, with an asymmetrical reflector and everything you would expect in a cyc light. There have been a lot of attempts to light a cyc with LEDs, some successful and some less so, but this is the only unit that I’m aware of that uses a traditional cyc light design to create the exceptionally smooth, even wash that we’re accustomed to in a cyc light.

The Spectra Series uses a 4-color LED system (Red, Green, Blue and Amber) to create a more complete range of colors than just using RGB color mixing. I could get into a lot of physics and graphs, but there are people who do that way better than me, but let’s just let it suffice to say that LEDs work similarly to fluorescent lights – some wavelengths of the visible spectrum simply aren’t present, so the better LED fixtures use more colors to try and fill in the gaps. The Spectra-Cyc is a 100 Watt fixture, so it’s very easy to light an entire cyc using just one 20A circuit! I used 5 units on a 35′ wide x 16′ high cyc and was very pleased with the coverage. To compare, I normally would have used 5 3-cell 500-watt cyc lights, for a potential power consumption of 7500 watts! My max power consumption using the Spectra Cycs was only 500 watts. Now of course you don’t typically turn all the cells of your cyc lights on at the same time, but you get the relative picture as far as power consumption.