Time to throw out the tungsten lights?

Recently i added a few LitePanle LEDs to my lighting kit so i wanted to learn a bit more about their properties (their color tint, how they respond to gels, how powerful they are). I set up 3 different lighting instruments: an HMI (LTM 200), a tungsten unit (Arri 650) and LED 1×1 (LitePanel 5600k Flood) unit and lit a scene. Now all those 3 lights are totally different instruments that have their strengths and weaknesses here they are being shown in very narrow test.

Camera used Canon 7D. All lights were placed 6 feel away from the table (for each picture each light was placed on the same stand). ISO was adjusted to provide more or less similar illumination from one light to another.

Here are 3 screen garbs with WB set to daylight (Arri gelled with CTB):

Here with WB set to tungsten:

And here to tungsten (HMI and LP gelled with CTO):

Conclusions:

– gelling any light other than tungsten produced unexpected results (some color shift)
– tungsten produces most natural colors
– LP in its native colors (here 5.6k) produces surprising good colors
– the bulb of this HMI is probably too fresh as it shows too much magenta (but i’m too lazy to redo the test with another HMI)
– when gelling lights it’s the fringes that show the most color distortions (see high res images below for better examples)
– 200 HMI is equivalent to 2x 650 with CTB !
– gelled, LP becomes almost unusable as 6 feet away from the subject the ISO has to be pushed to 1000!
– generally it’s best no to gel lights that are used as key to light your talent (unless going for an effect)

High res files to download:
http://tupeloproductions.com/gear/LP_test/

Here is the composite with best native white balance: