Mole-Richardson LED lights

LED lights Mole Richardson from UrbanFox.TV on Vimeo.

LED lights that are fully colour matched to traditional incandescent fixtures are the promise of Mole-Richardson with its first move into LED lighting.

Although broadcast LED lighting has been around for several years, finding fixtures that don’t suck isn’t easy. Certainly, cheap LED lights exhibit huge colour spikes and troughs, making it impossible to match them with traditional lighting fixtures (and difficult to colour correct for). Even more expensive LED lights haven’t been perfect.

This year there have been several introductions that are a great deal more accurate, and Mole-Richardson’s new ranges are amongst the best we’ve seen.

The lights use a new Osram Kreios LED that was “designed for us specifically for the film industry. The tungsten matches traditional tungsten lights on film exactly,” said Mole-Richardson’s Sales Director Paul Royalty (pictured).

“We worked very closely with the ASC, Kodak, Panavision and Technicolor to ensure it matched.”

Its mainstay $4,500 12-Pack uses 12 circuit boards, each with 20 LEDs (for 240 total). The fixture is DC driven (10-50 volts – so that it works with a wide range of power sources) and DC dimmed. “This doesn’t have any flicker,” Royalty said. The tungsten version is claimed to offer the output of an equivalent 750W traditional fixture, while the daylight version gives about 10% more output, because the LED chip is naturally blue.

The much smaller, 20W Single uses just one circuit board and its size makes it suitable for use in a car or other confined space.

It is offered as a three light kit (tungsten or daylight) for $3,500, with a three-light controller (below) with master and individual dimmers, plus fixed and wireless DMX control. An accessory turns three Singles into a larger compact light.

It has also developed two prototype LED Fresnel lights – a 600W and 1kW equivalent (using about 10% of the power), which it hopes to have ready to ship by NAB (April 2013). It will come in a new design of fixture, but “it will also come as a retrofit for our existing incandescent product,” offering an easy way for its customers to upgrade.

Mole-Richardson took its time before adopting LEDs. “We wanted to see where the industry wanted to go and needed to find a partner that could deliver the colour quality we wanted,” said Royalty.

“It had to match existing fixtures. Other manufacturers want you to throw out your traditional fixtures, but we don’t feel that is the best way to go.”

By David Fox