Courtesy of Lumenaar LED Production Lighting
TECH C OLUMN
Toronto Start-up Hopes To Shine Brightly D
avid Geldart thinks he has a brighter idea for LED lighting panels. As president and founder of Lumenaar LED Production Lighting, Geldart has bootstrapped the start-up company to the brink of launch with a vision of bringing a newer, brighter form of LED lighting to the stage, cinemagraphic and still image work space. While LED boxes are carving out a niche in productions and have many attributes that make them attractive over those HMI light sources, they still don’t have the punch and power needed to push the old technology off the set. It may never happen; it may happen tomorrow. Such is the nature of technology and the pace of change. What sets Lumenaar’s range of 35, 65, 100 and 200 watt panels apart from the competitors on the marketplace is what Geldart calls “the secret sauce.” “With LED the problem is the compromise between colour and brightness,” he says. “You can get accurate colour but you lose brightness, but if you want brightness you lose colour.” It all started about a year ago when Geldart was approached by Korean-Canadian entrepreneur Simon
24 • Canadian Cinematographer - December 2014
Park. At the time Geldart had switched off from animation and media and returned to his art roots, running an LED lighting company, focused on residential-commercial track lighting and specialty lighting, with a special focus on art gallery lights. “He said he had a patent to deliver colour with brightness in LED, which no one else could do,” Geldart says. They call it Spectral CBET – Colour Balance Enhancement Technology – and a couple of prototypes later, the product’s just about ready for launch, having secured their UL/CSA and other industry standard approvals mid-September following a roll out at NAB this past spring. The difference with the Lumenaar system, he says, is that instead of coating the Blue LED emitter with phosphorus dye to create yellow, which in turn dulls the intensity, their LED uses a standard phosphorus which doesn’t diminish brightness as much. The lights are controlled by an intermediate panel that acts much like an analogue filter. The result is a lightweight luminous box with digital controls on the back which can separately ramp up brightness and colour temperature. Where it’s
different, he says, is that colour temperature isn’t a straight line when you go from the warm end at 2,600K through the cool end of 5,000 and above. “It’s actually a curve,” he explains. “Our lights stay on that curve and don’t drop off, so the colour is much more accurate.” At the same time, he says, the brightness doesn’t drop. Toronto-based still shooter Matthew Plexman got his hands on the 100-watt prototype and used it for a commercial shoot and says he was impressed with the technology, though the units he had are much bulkier and heavier than the final production designs now rolling out. “It was extremely bright compared to the rented LED panels I’ve used in the past,” he says. “It was much brighter than the 1000-watt tungsten light I was using with a light box.” The added bonus was that there was no heat. The prototype controls were a little clunky, but in the final product Plexman likes the idea of being able to quickly dial up the brightness or colour balance to match either a natural daylight source or a tungsten. “Being a soft light, the output it has is pretty phenomenal,” he says, adding that the see Tech page 26
