Hiyall,
brand new here, so here’s for a quick intro : i’m a light designer specialized in theatrical lighting.
About 10 years ago, when powerleds were still quite new on the market, the main supply source came from Luxeon. I decided i would design a 72W professional led fixture, since there was nothing comparable on the market. Once eventually finished, i tested it on stage and quickly found out that, for as powerful as it was, it was pretty much unusable without an deadly efficient diffuser.
Searching out the web, i found out about light shaping and holographic diffusers. Luminit was born about a year before.
I was lucky enough to ask for and, eventually, be awarded with quite a few samples from them.
Circular, elliptical and even square diffusers, from 10° up to 100°.
Let me tell you something : those things are great, they worked flawlessly and the quality of the light repartition was, from my POV, unseen before.
Their sole flaw, in fact, is their pricetag : as they then told me, the guys at Luminit don’t care much for retail, they mostly work for TV and flatscreens companies, hence the hefty price.
But, if you need a professional result and a dense, uniform, precisely shaped and angled, and perfectly mixed light field, then your quest is over : as far as i’m concerned, i’ve never seen any such thing.
Those diffusers get reaaaally great when it comes to mixing colored led light. At this time, we were looking more for subtle tints and delicate hues than for a plain — always kinda brutal when it comes to leds — color mix. And, no matter what i could try, diy or off the shelf, the result was always pretty coarse, crude and unsatisfying. But as soon as i fitted one of their products (.025, 10 to 30° circular) on my fixtures, i found out my problem had disappeared : the beam’s angle was amazingly precise, the colors were perfectly mixed, without any hotspot, any surrepresentation of a particular color (think of red and amber, for instance…) or any break of any kind when dimming or switching colors, no more rainbow effect at the edge, but just a thick, so dense that you could cut through it, beam of calibrated light.
The losses are neglectable, with a transmission rate around 87% if i remember well [edit :i just checked, and it’s actually 92% !!], which makes it just as [edit : waaay more] efficient as most affordable glass lenses on the market. More important still, you really feel like every lumen emitted lands on its target, like every photon is used. Even the shadows are tinted, without any interference fringe or diffracting effect. For a stage light designer, it means being able to play with the blacks way more precisely and intensely than with incandescent or even HID fixtures. It also ables me to considerably lower the forward current that drives the luxeons, resulting in much less heat and a longer lifespan.
Bref, i’d recommend these light shapers to anyone looking for a close to perfect result.
Seb