Why Quality Matters in LED Uplights

Moutai Day - Lighting Producer, 2016
Production Company: Repertoire Productions,  Client: Moutai,  Event: Moutai Day, Venue: iHangar, San Francisco

Let’s talk about LED uplighting. There is a big difference in quality of LED lights that come from different manufacturers. The advantage of purchasing lights that are less expensive is obviously the cost savings, however there are many drawbacks.

The first important and under-looked consideration is homogeneity, which is to say that all of the fixtures coming from the same manufacturer should behave the same way. You would think that all fixtures from the same manufacturer would match the version of firmware, especially in the same shipment, but that is not always the case.

A second consideration is the manufacturer's customer service, which you will never have to deal with as an event planner, however there is still a cost. Cheaper lights rarely come backed with a customer service guarantee, so that ultimately when the lights fail, there is no recourse to your lighting vendor. This usually means that corrupted or old LED lights will end up in a landfill. Not the best option if you are considering environmental impact. In addition, this means that vendors have to increase their cost of service over time.

Finally, let's provide a case study of how using an inexpensive LED light may not be the best choice as a production company or event planner.  You hire a vendor to do the lighting for an event, and the vendor wants to save a few dollars by renting the cheaper LED uplights and hopefully passing on some of the cost savings to you.  However, one or more of the lights inevitably fails to operate properly during the event. A more experienced vendor knows to compensate for this by having additional fixtures available as a backup, so they will rent you additional fixtures as part of the package, hence most of the cost savings are eliminated.

The other result of this failure is that the lights are rendered inoperable until they are repaired. If the cheaper lights have no customer service plan in place, then repair falls on the vendor and their skills in the realm of circuit board repair and deciphering the firmware that was programmed into it from who-knows-where. It is also a known pitfall that manufacturers who are producing inexpensive lights commonly upgrade the firmware versions of their lights from batch to batch, and then actually ship them out that way. This means that someone purchasing the lights may receive from an order of 100 units, possibly 1/3 of them in one version, a second version and yet a third in the same order. This means that each batch or sub batch of those lights behave differently, and not operate in the same way as the other firmware versions. If this is the kind of thing that happens at a show, it could be disastrously embarrassing. A client who is paying for a specific show and I particular look may not appreciate the inner workings of cheaper lights and the reasoning why they are not all working in the same way!

At the end of the day, you get what you pay for. There are established manufacturing companies that make specific lights and they are intended to all function in the same way as a group (Think apples to apples). Also, more expensive lights Often come with a customer service package that enables you to send that non-functioning fixture back to them for repair, and they usually return it to you in a reasonable amount of time.

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