Friday, January 19, 2018
Help Wanted to Save Tungsten
Lighting&Sound America Online - News: In response to the news that the EU is once again contemplating banning the use of tungsten halogen light bulbs in entertainment lighting, the Association of Lighting Designers (ALD) is coordinating a high speed effort to gather reasons why this ban should not move forward, particularly from those who would be materially affected by such a ban, in time to create a formal response before the end of the proposal's consultation period on January 26, 2018.
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4 comments:
I always have a problem when a regulatory commission wants to ban something that they claim will be for the greater good. In this case Tungsten lamps. As a person who has on many occasions used tungsten fixtures, I can tell you that they have a warmth that is only just now beginning to appear in LED fixtures. LED technology in lighting is getting better but it is still in it’s childhood stages. It will be a few years more before the LED lights can fully replace current tungsten. The other aspect of all this, which I am glad to see the article touch upon, is cost. LED fixtures, still being relatively new, are still very costly. For a small theatre that may have say 400 ellipsoidal tungsten fixtures, replacing all of them with LED equivalents costing roughly 2000.00 a piece, could be a disaster and force the theatre to have to close instead of comply. The regulators say, oh well it’s all for the greater good, but where is the good when a theatre is forced to close because it can’t afford lighting to appease the regulators. I am all for environmental impact changes, but not at the cost of a theatre whose is the heart and soul of a community.
I understand where the EU’s idea to ban Tungsten fixtures is coming from, but the article is extremely persuasive. As the article points out, forcing theaters to not be able get build for the fixture would prevent them from using large chunks of their inventory. Though maybe one day theaters will use almost exclusively LED fixtures, many theaters do primarily use Tungsten fixtures. These theaters may have to shut down because the expense of buying new LED fixtures will get to be to high. I wonder if there would be a compromise that would make both the theater community and the EU happy. For example, maybe a slower phase out of the lamps, helping theaters that want to replace their stock to do so with LEDs, or allowing them to be used only on rare occasions. Overall, I understand why the Association of Lighting Designers is pushing for people to show their support for Tungsten. I’m interested to see how this progresses and if ALD is able to keep their Tungsten Fixtures.
I personally don’t know much about lighting technology, so this article was very interesting to read. From what I knew about tungsten lamps, the ban seemed to be coming from a good place: attempting to conserve some energy and resources because live theatre can be very wasteful. However, the sources the author quotes in this article seem very knowledgeable and the article brings up many good arguments. It’s true that while non-LED fixtures use more power, they’re dimmed very frequently and the impact is not as big as the ALD says. There is also a very different look between tungsten fixtures and LED fixtures. You can always tell when the stage is being lit by LED lighting because it seems very cold, while other fixtures produce a more natural looking light. I also hadn’t even considered that in order to comply with the ban, theatre’s would need to replace every fixture in their inventory which indeed would be a devastating blow to most if not all of them. I do think other ways of conserving power should be explored but I very much understand not wanting this ban.
Banning tungsten fixtures on the premise of aiding the environment through energy savings is quite an intriguing argument. The global theatre industry tends to generate a high output of waste, and also uses massive amounts of energy for productions. As such, seeking to reduce both waste and power usage where possible seems to be a good idea, at least in theory. However, as many others have mentioned, I believe that forcing theatres that reside within the EU to scrap a majority of their lighting stock in fell swoop could potentially force many of these organizations to buckle underneath the expense of replacing their fixtures with more environmentally-friendly LED fixttures. Further, LED technology is only very recently begun to be able to match some of the wavelengths of light that tungsten fixtures put out. Still, they cannot quite match that broad spectrum of light that designers everywhere are used to working to. As such, unless the EU's real goal here is to cripple the theatre industry across Europe, a compromise must be negotiated to allow theatres to phase out their stock.
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