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I will say that incandescents still have a specific use case in entertainment. Newer fixtures are LEDs, but stage/film is largely comprised of community theaters and indie projects that can’t afford to pay $500 per light to upgrade to LED. Because a lot of fixtures need to be completely replaced, instead of simply swapping out an incandescent lamp for an LED.

Basically, LED’s fucking suck at dimming. They’ve gotten much better in recent years, but they’re nowhere near incandescents. If you need a slow gradual dim over two or three minutes for a stage effect (like the sun setting during a play) incandescents can do that easily. The dimmers will have distinct “steps” (because they’re digitally controlled, and are 8 bit, so they only have 256 “levels”), but the thermal inertia in the lamp’s filament will smooth out those distinct steps. For example, going from 246 to 245 isn’t immediately noticeable, because the filament just slowly cools and dims as the voltage drops slightly. It naturally smooths out the dim curve. But LEDs don’t do that. When you drop from 246 to 245, you get a distinct “jump” when the light immediately shifts from one intensity to the next. Even small steps are immediately noticeable, because there isn’t any thermal inertia to smooth out that dim.

So we don’t use LEDs on voltage dimmers. Instead, we dim them electronically. This comes with its own set of problems though. For starters, it means you’re installing an entire control unit, instead of simply replacing the lamp. This is a retrofit part that attaches onto your fixture and replaces the standard lamp socket. (For reference, the right image is the standard lamp housing, and the left is the LED retrofit.) But if your fixtures are super old, (as is common with lots of churches and community theaters,) they probably aren’t going to fit the LED units that are on the market because lighting fixtures aren’t universal. So now you need to replace the entire fixture, instead of installing a retrofit. And that’s obviously even more expensive, because now you’re buying entire fixtures. And when even smaller theaters will have 50 or 60 lights, that $500 retrofit quickly begins to add up. Especially when you consider that the vast majority of theaters are non-profit, and will need to fundraise to buy them. So you suddenly have a bunch of small non-profits and churches looking at mid-five figure bills just to keep their lights on. Larger spaces are looking at bills closer to six figures.

Next, there’s the issue with color. LEDs have historically been really bad at something called CRI. That’s basically a measure of how well you’re able to distinguish individual colors in the light. Incandescents emit photons at everything in the visible spectrum, so they actually have really great CRI. They tend to bias towards warmer colors, but cool colors are still acceptable. But anyone who has used early LEDs knows how “washed out” they can make things look. This is because LEDs have historically been hilariously awful at CRI. They’re usually monochromatic, meaning they only emit light in a very narrow bandwidth. So everything outside of that narrow bandwidth gets lost. Even the “white” LEDs have historically just been a combination of several monochromatic emitters. So you can see things that are red, green, or blue, but anything else in between looks faded. Or it’s a “full spectrum” emitter that has major dips in certain spots. This is obviously horrible for something like film, where actors and directors tend to complain when your lights make them look sickly and pale in every shot.

It also complicates the setup slightly, because now every single fixture needs both a power and a data cable, when previously they only needed power. Lights are controlled via a protocol called DMX, and previously you could simply run DMX to your dimmers to control everything. But now each individual light needs DMX. Not a huge issue for permanent installs, but for a tour that is setting up and taking down their lighting rig multiple times per week, this extra labor time to set up and run data quickly begins to add up. And as someone who has had to troubleshoot plenty of systems, every single fixture is now a potential point of failure for your lighting rig.

New builds should absolutely be planning on using LEDs going forwards, and they have already been working on that. Pretty much every theater or church built within the last 5 years has LEDs. But before that, the dimming/color issues with LEDs made them untenable for use on stage. So anything older than that still has incandescents. And the ban has actually caused a run on supplies, with theaters/churches/film studios/etc scrambling to stockpile incandescent lamps while they’re still available, just to postpone the inevitable $30k-$90k bill to upgrade to LEDs. And ironically enough, the entertainment lamps have historically had a carve-out exception to the law. But lawmakers have repeatedly threatened to close that loophole. So every time it makes the headlines again, there’s another mad rush for lamps as every single theater, church, and film lot scrambles to refresh their stockpile.