Emulating Tungsten lighting with RGB+CCT
Question appeared on a forum to which I belong with regard to emulating tungsten lighting with RGB+CCT. To find out, I fitted a good old fashioned Philips “Photocrescenta” incandescent bulb and a Mi-Light FUT-105 LED into a double E27 double bulb holder and mounted the assembly on a standard studio boom arm. The Mi-Light FUT 105 is a RGB+CCT (controlled colour temperature) unit with a sturdy die-cast aluminium base that doubles as a heat-sink. In addition to red, green and blue LED’s the FUT-105 and its ilk also have warm white (2700K) and cool white (6500K) LEDs.
Despite their low cost (this 1100 Lumen 12 watt variety set me back just £15 a pop), they can be accurately controlled with a wireless remote or using standard wi-fi and a controller app on a smartphone. There is also an OpenHAB “Thing” module that purports to control it too though I’ve to set that up yet. This is mostly because I am lazy. But also, the Mi-Light/MiBoxer controller software is free, works quite nicely and will independently control 8 sets of lights in an almost unlimited number of zones. I guess there must be a limit but I never reached it! 🙂
In this experiment, both the bulbs in the photos are running at full power. To make the Mi-Light FUT-105 resemble the incandescent bulb, I set its colour temperature to 3000 Kelvin, no RGB, then took a few snaps. They are also SooC. No editing. I did it by eye, no special measuring kit. The camera white balance was set to “cloudy day” for all three shots, so one can compare the effect reasonably accurately.
Power
When making comparisons between various technologies or products, I’m becoming increasingly interested by the amount of power things consume. The Philips Photocrescenta incandescent bulb consumed 150 watts and its base had reached 189°C within two minutes. In fact I was worried about it melting the bulb-holder. The Mi-Light FUT-105 RGB+CCT LED bulb consumed 12 watts and its base reached 37°C in the same period of time.
Which is why I don’t use incandescent lighting any more. 🙂