Like many of us, whenever my 7-year-old walks into a theatre, he tends to look up and ask,
“Papa, is that an ETC light?”
One time, he asked me this in front of the technical team as he pointed to their Source Fours.
They smiled and told him that those fixtures were almost as old as his dad- that they had
bought them back in the 90s.
He responded by saying, “Wow- that’s really old!”- a comment that, frankly, made me wince.
but they gracefully countered, “You may think that’s old, but they’re still
lighting shows like they’re young at heart.”
Sound familiar?
There are so many venues that have halogen Source Fours
Still in operation,
still emitting beautiful light decades later.
Those original Source Fours were built to last, and indeed, they’ve endured for more than a generation.
But for the last 10 years, the market has shifted.
LEDs have taken over.
And it feels like new LED stage lights are being introduced at the frequency of computers and smartphones.
And like computers and smartphones, the market wants to convince you that LED luminaires
are evolving pieces of technology that won’t last as long as those archaic, incandescent Source Fours.
I ask you this:
Why?
The market wants you to believe this colorful technology, which is amazing,
is expendable like computers and smartphones.
"Get used to throwing them away after a few years and just replace them with the latest and greatest."
But with prices that are 2, 3, even 4-times higher
than an original Source Four, I ask you again:
Why?
I believe we should expect new LED fixtures to last for many years.
I believe a well-built fixture is a worthy and more sustainable investment.
And I believe there are many modest venues at the heart of our industry that need us
to invest in durable LED products because it will give them access to newer technologies
through donations and used-good sales.
This is what we did with the original Source Four.
Why does this have to change with LEDs?
When you are evaluating LED products,
I challenge all of you to consider more than just your artistic specifications.
I challenge you to ask these three, simple questions:
#1 How efficient is it?
#2 How consistent will it perform?
And #3 Is there evidence it is built to last?
Answering these questions will help you find LED products that will make beautiful light for years to come.
So how does electrical efficiency lead to longevity?
Simply put, if a product can meet your artistic needs AND consume less electricity,
then it has been designed to mitigate a major accelerant of the aging process: heat.
Think about this: artists need rich color bright enough for the audience to see.
This is tricky with LED technology because these objectives, richness and brightness,
work against each other.
To create rich color, you need saturated hues of LEDs.
More colors equals better light.
This is why ETC uses 5, 6, even 8 different colors in our arrays.
But using saturated colors lowers the fixture’s lumen potential.
Lime and Mint – they generate a lot of lumens.
But Indigo and Red? Not so much.
So how did ETC rectify this tug of war between
rich color and intensity?
Efficacy.
Our engineers designed LED fixtures that are
extremely efficient at turning watts into lumens.
Why?
Because in order to make a product that delivers rich, beautiful and bright colors,
they simply had no lumens to waste.
One of our most popular fixtures, the ColorSource Spot,
has an efficacy of 42 lumens per Watt.
The Source Four LED Series-2 Lustr has an efficacy of 52 lumens per Watt.
Other LED lights that compete with these products in price and performance
range from 18 to 26 lumens per Watt.
In fact, if you compare their efficacy to a traditional Source Four,
which ranges from 13 to 22 lumens per Watt,
it seems like many of these products haven’t even attempted to improve their efficiency over incandescent sources.
That’s like buying a hybrid automobile that gets 13 miles to the gallon!
(or 18 liters per 100 km for those that use the metric system)
Higher efficacy means you can use more colors
and get brighter results.
This is a big win for the design team!
But it is also a big indicator of longevity,
because higher efficacy means less heat.
Watts being converted to lumens are not being converted to heat.
Heat is wasted energy that creates all sorts of problems.
It causes LEDs to droop.
It ages electrical components.
Heat is a problem that needs constant management
unless you are okay with unstable light or products that don’t last.
For the record, we are not okay with this,
which leads me to my second question- how consistent will the product perform?
LEDs, by their nature, are inconsistent.
Manufacturers of emitters organize them into “bins” with similar characteristics.
But the simple fact is- no two LEDs are exactly the same.
To further complicate things,
each LED’s intensity is dependent on its ambient temperature.
Individual LEDs will droop as they heat up, and different colors of LEDs droop at different rates.
So if you think designing an LED fixture that produces the same color as other LED fixtures
at a stable intensity even as it heats up and cools down
sounds like really complicated problem to solve-
-then you’ve understood me perfectly.
It is a complicated problem to solve!
Fortunately, at ETC, our engineers are magicians.
They approached this challenge with a sophisticated, multi-prong management system
we refer to as “Color Integrity.”
First, we study the binning options of each color
and buy the ones that yield the most consistent performance.
We’ve been doing this for many years and have fostered great partnerships
with the industry’s best LED vendors.
We are able to routinely source the most reliable emitters.
Like a chef who procures high quality ingredients, we start off in a strong place.
Next, we run fixtures through a calibration process.
We measure both the intensity and spectral output of each individual color
and record this information onto a microchip that lives within the fixture.
If one fixture has a brighter amber than the others, it knows.
Color a little off?
It knows that too and can make internal adjustments to its output so it remains consistent with the others.
Calibration ensures consistent chromaticity, automatically.
I’m going to go off on a tangent for a moment,
because I love color and want to issue a warning about calibration modes.
They are not all created equal.
Although you should expect any active calibration system to give you consistency,
you need to ask: “At what price?”
Here’s a gamut chart of two LED fixtures,
one is the Source Four LED Series 3 Lustr X8
and the other is another LED spotlight that recently hit the market.
This is the range of colors these products can make in an uncalibrated mode.
What happens when calibration is turned on?
The X8’s gamut didn’t change- which is great!
But the other product wasn’t so lucky.
Its gamut shrank quite a bit.
What does that mean to you, the artist?
Less color.
If you love colors like me- especially saturated colors- this is an unfortunate tradeoff.
Those of you lighting for camera know the industry’s move to wider gamuts is here.
You’re shooting streaming content in the Rec2020 color space
even though it isn’t actually streamed that way yet.
You’re planning for the future.
Our Lustr X8 products cover 94% of Rec2020, while other products only cover up to 87%.
And its not just gamut range that’s important-
if calibration isn’t done right, it can also hamper how you control the light.
Many products limit you to an RGB or an HSI mode when it’s calibrated.
This is unfortunate, because the modern designer has started to unleash the creative potential
of LED technology through metameric control.
They have told us they need direct control of the colors
because metamerism has become an important paintbrush in their creative toolbox.
They have told us they need calibration, but they also need to control the individual colors directly.
This is why we recently implemented a calibration algorithm in new products
that works even in Direct Mode.
And not only do we use this in our fos/4, Source Four LED Series 3, Desire Fresnel,
and S4WRD Color products,
but we also were able to add this feature to the Source Four LED Series 2 Lustr,
which is a heck of an enhancement for people that bought those over the last 8 years.
If you are unfamiliar with the concept of metamerism-
there is another CUE session led by Declan Randall on this topic.
Watch it.
It’s brilliant and will blow your mind.
Speaking of metamers, have you heard about the new Tune feature
in Series 3, fos/4, and Desire Fresnel products?
It’s basically like umami for light…
It’s delicious!
But I digress.
I need to circle back to our discussion about “Color Integrity”
and the third technology ETC uses to make our products perform consistently:
Thermal droop compensation.
Picture this moment:
a designer mixes the perfect lavender during tech.
Then on opening night, something’s wrong.
The color doesn’t seem right at all.
What happened?
The fixtures she used did not have droop compensation technology,
and those products warmed up more during rehearsal than in the performance,
thus producing a different color of light.
If we are looking at fixtures as long-term investments, this isn’t ok.
To fix the problem, ETC places multiple sensors around the LED array
to measure the temperature multiple times per second,
then the fixture automatically adjusts the intensity of the LED emitters
in order to maintain a consistent output.
And since different colors of LED emitters droop at different rates,
the thermal droop algorithms compensate for both intensity AND chromaticity,
resulting in stable output and stable color.
Our Color Integrity system is complex,
but you, the user, don’t need to think about it.
It just works.
Quietly.
Consistently.
It makes these inherent challenges of LED technology an afterthought.
And that’s how it should be.
The design team has enough to worry about- they don’t need to chase drifting color and intensity.
But there is another benefit to this active color management system- protection.
Over-driving LEDs with maximum power is one of the primary reasons LEDs fail early.
To actively stabilize color and intensity, we under-drive the LEDs.
We use this “head room” to offset the impacts of LED droop.
If a product is deploying technologies to make its performance consistent
then it’s actively protecting the LEDs.
And this protection helps the product last a long time.
And when you think about it, color integrity has always been an issue for designers.
It used to be that you would replace burned-out gel with a fresh new cut.
That was a cheap and straightforward fix.
But when color shifts within a poor-quality LED fixture, all you can do is replace the whole fixture.
Let’s not do that.
So the final question you should ask- is there evidence the fixture will last?
If it’s an ETC fixture, then the answer is a resounding "yes".
Initially we studied LM80 and LM79 data.
These are tests which LED manufacturers perform on their emitters to measure characteristics
like lumen maintenance, color, power draw, and light distribution over time in specific environmental conditions.
But we ran into an obstacle- not all of the LED emitters had done these tests!
Why?
Because traditional users, like traffic light signals, aren’t concerned about lumen maintenance.
I will note, this is a problem that has been addressed.
These manufacturers are now doing this testing on all the emitters we use,
in part because of our strong relationship with these LED vendors.
But this took years to implement, so we did our own testing in the meantime.
We built finished products and sent them to a lab to get LM84 testing,
which measures the performance of a complete fixture, rather than the single emitters.
How did we do?
We did great!
After thousands of hours of testing (it takes about a year to run the test)
the performance of our products was extremely stable
and based off these test results we increased the L70 ratings for many of our products.
But this wasn’t enough.
We want real world data.
So we actively collect our products from high-use applications
like late night talkshows and broadcast studios.
When we get these units, our engineers measure each fixture’s intensity and chromaticity,
then compare this to their initial calibration measurements,
which we keep on file for every product we make.
The result?
We consistently find that our fixtures are holding up.
I reviewed two reports recently, one was for 15 Source Four LEDs that were 6 years old,
another was for half a dozen D60 XTs that lived outside in the Middle East for 3 years.
How did they turn out?
Their drift in color and intensity was almost imperceptible.
And finally, we keep a close eye on our repair data.
After 13 years of producing hundreds of thousands of LED stage lights,
our repair department has seen less than 2% of these products we’ve shipped,
and only a small fraction of these were out of warranty.
In fact, all of these data points,
the repair statistics, measuring products from the field, and the LM84 testing
compelled us to extend our warranty.
So we don’t just have evidence that proves our products will last.
We also have a 5 year warranty on our LED fixtures
and a 10 year warranty on our LED arrays to back that claim up.
It’s been quite a journey for ETC as we’ve endeavored to make the world’s best LED stage lights.
We’ve asked the hard questions.
We’ve studied the complicated problems.
And we’ve developed cutting-edge technologies that make sure you can count on our products
every time, for a long time.
Ask other manufacturers if they did the same.
This matters to us, because every time my children step into a theatre and point up at “Papa’s lights,”
I want to know that the LED fixtures ETC is shipping today
will still be hanging in theaters after they grow up.
I don’t want them in a landfill.
I want them there, still producing beautiful light should my children need them to light a show.