NAB 2012 – What comes after LED? The Zacuto Plasma Light

by Sebastian WöberApril 25^th, 2012

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For your information: I recorded more videos at NAB than the ones you’re seeing on this news blog and I’m filtering the products I find useful and helpful. I test the products at the show so you will only find NAB videos of companies I find worthy to be supported here. That being said, here’s a product that really stood out. Let me tell you why:

The Zacuto Z-Light Plasmalight looks like it could be a true alternative to LED. Do we need an alternative to LED? Yes. While LED offers numerous advantages over conventional light fixtures and professional LED’s color rendition has reached an acceptable level there are still some issues that remain:
– LED is expensive
– LED isn’t perfectly soft
– barndoors will cast multishadows
– and LED usually hurts the actors eyes

It’s nice to see a technology that solves these problems and I hope the Z-light will really be “$500 cheaper than everything else”.

There’s another new soft light technology that was presented at NAB 2012:

PRG TruColor HS Remote Phosphor Lighting that is basically an LED panel that triggers a chemical reaction of some sort in an overlaying panel that can be interchanged for another color blend and outputs a whopping 4000 watt tungsten equivalent of light. That’s nice, but it’s also expensive at $3500. See a video about this technology by our friends from freshDV and nextwaveDV below.

Let’s hope these lights evolve quickly to give us the advantages of these fixtures at a price we can afford.