Despite the Hype, LEDs Haven’t Revolutionized Broadcasting

When LEDs began to take over from old-style light bulbs in homes and businesses, the film industry looked on in awe. The mathematics were impossible to ignore: at a conservative estimation, these new light sources produced four or five times as much light as the traditional technology for the same power? And despite some early uncertainty over color rendering, it’s now reasonably easy to obtain lights that fulfill that early promise to at least some degree. Over roughly the same period of time, we’ve also seen camera sensitivity increase greatly. Film never really got much faster than ISO 500 — there was some 800 but it was grainy, perhaps so grainy that people preferred to push-process the 500 and end up in much the same place.