The future of HMI’s

[TimoVanLierop]

Hey!

What do you guys think about the future of HMI lights?

LED is becoming brighter and brighter. And it’s way easier to use and a lot cheaper.

It’s just a matter of a few years that brands like Aputure will come with a LS2500D, LS4000D I guess.

Do you think LED will take over the most used HMI’s in the next years? Or are there some big advantages of HMI’s?

Topic

[gabj3]

Cost and consistency,

Not to sound like a broken record but, a part from a single phosphor white light LED. All LED’s have spiky discontinuous spectrums that limit the gamut of colours being resolved underneath them but, also means cross shooting with different formats with different spectral primaries difficult.

A HMI does inherently have a spiky spectrum and does lack in consistency but, it’s tried and tested and we acclimatised to the disparity between fixtures.

If you buy an old decrepit HMI with a new bulb, you know what you’re getting unlike an old decrepit LED. Also changeable bulbs – that’s possible with LEDs but require calibration.

Also I believe from an actual power ratio LEDs and HMIs are similar. The difference is more a HMI bulb emits at 4pir2 as a point source and therefore loses total output in its ‘beam angle’ unlike an LEDs linear plane.

Also, heat dispersion for LEDs is still quite tricky so an 18k or 24k HMI may stay unmatched for a few years to come.

But, yes, LEDs are taking over… just buy the good ones!

 

 

Infinityvision.tv
Gabriel Devereux - Engineer

[Stip]

I’d like to disagree (except about large HMI units won’t be replaced for many years to come).

LEDs are getting better and cheaper at a lightning speed. Even affordable LED film lights already have good color, heck even the newest dirt-cheap Chinese (non) brands get the accuracy pretty good by now. At this point, output punch is pretty much the only thing HMI still has the upper hand and I think large HMI units are the one’s that will stay around the longest.

Btw, I won’t miss the consistent color discrepancies from rented HMI, and needing to swap units or bulbs so often, at all.

[dmullenasc]

The ability to dim an LED will make it more popular than HMI’s over time; the main issue today is just output. Even today, a Source-4 LED Leko is not as bright as a Joker 800 Jo-Leko.  I will be happy not to deal with HMIs in the future. However, I will miss tungsten fresnels!

[Author]

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