How To Choose An LED Light

There's nothing wrong with tungsten lights as they are cheap and excellent quality but most people want to use LEDs now as they are much more convenient as they don't need as much power and are cooler running.

Shape. LED lights also come in a varity of shapes which is why they are also very popular. Some are singular color, other bi-color, and the most complex in RGB(+ other colors).

  • Handheld. These are on the portable side as you could hand hold them. They are typically of the tube variety but just with a handheld grip section. Power wise these are low powered.
  • Tube. These look like older fluorescent tubes. Power wise these are low to medium powered. They can be grouped together in "banks" to boost their power as a group.
  • On camera. These are ultra portable and meant to be on camera. These are ultra low to low powered.
  • COB / Monolights. These come in all sizes from low to very high powered.
  • Flat panel. They come in different sizes like 1x1 feet to huge mats like 8x8 and all sorts of intermediate sized 2x1, 2x2, 4x2, 4x4, etc. They even come in circle shapes. The power output gets higher when the size gets larger.
  • Flexible. These are kind of like the flatpanels but instead of a hard backing of plastic or metal they are made of flexible cloth.
  • Bulb. These are great for replacing practicals. They come in ultra low to medium power.

Power. How do I personally define power? It's more on a functional level. I break these down into different levels. Of course distance matters so an ultra lower powered light 1 foot away maybe ok but it'll also be in the shot and it would be useless with any modifiers. Modifiers may cut or boost output depending on what it is. Any reflectors will boost and diffusors will cut.

  • Ultra low is good for personal space distances. <10W. This is good for on camera interviews.
  • Low is good for up close key lights for a single subject without modifiers. ~25W.
  • Medium is power level where using a modifier could be possible at up close distances. 50W-100W. This is also the end of using small batteries sized 99Wh as being functional to use as it would last only 1 hour for a 100W light.
  • Medium-high I'd say is 200W to 400W. That's a decent range for being a key light in larger modifiers for a single subject just slightly off camera.
  • High is 600-1200W. This is good if you want to light a larger space or a group of people.
  • Very high is like 2400W and above. If you need to compete with the sun, this is what you'd need. You could probably do this with the weaker lights if they had a boosting modifier and up close.

Quality of light. This means how much of the light spectrum is reproduced. LEDs used to be so-so quality for daylight and tungsten in the beginning (and even had some nasty green tint) but on average they are much better nowadays. Showing something like SSI or TCLI isn't fully indicitive of quality. For RGB, there's still a bunch of work to be done. When you see something like 80% of such and such gamut reproduced, the question is so which 20% is missing? Since I find RGB is more creative in nature, I'm not so worried about this. The manufacturers keep adding more colors e.g. RGBW, RGBACL, and some brands run their own mix of other colors for better output. The better RGB lights do get more saturation.

Light shaping possibilities. You can't take semi soft lights like flat panels and tubes and make them hard but you can make hard lights like bulbs and cob/monolights and make them soft. Cobs/monolights can also get amplified with reflectors and fresnels. You can restrict many types of lights with grids. Only some with barndoors. For softboxes, they come in different shapes and sometimes you may want to reflections / catch lights to be one shape or the other. 

App control. I'm not an app person as I like more tactile feedback but some people like to stick with the same brand of lights so that they can control everything using one app. It is quite convenient but I rather use the next type of control because of higher level of programability.

DMX / CRMX control. You can use control surfaces or computer programs to do elaborate sequences with your lights so I prefer this method of control.

Dimming. This is particular but it is important. Some more powerful lights can't dim very low so they end up being too powerful. Other lights have changable curves where some people may have a preference how the light changes it's output.