The Image L80 LED story begins in 1995 when visual effects cinematographer Mark Weingartner, working on a 200ft/60M greenscreen stage for Under Siege II, Dark Territory, asked Kino Flo Lighting Systems to design an energy efficient, high output panel array capable of hitting the maximum lux points without sacrificing soft, supergreen color density essential for travelling matte photography. The Kino Flo Image Series was born! The light changed the way Hollywood has made movies ever since. Years of advanced chemistry and software design research have served as the foundation for a new generation of Kino Flo Lighting’s Image L80 LED fixtures, endowed with superior high color rendering white light and boasting a full hue and saturation gamut, including the company’s own supergreen and superblue visual effects colors.
The versatile Image L80’s come with yoke mount options for studio grid installations and variable beam pitch control to ensure an even flow of illumination from the top of a cyc wall (as high as 60 feet/20 meters) all the way out to stage forward. The downfacing panels are as bright as tungsten spacelights, and the True Match® firmware ensures more dynamic light control than other LED spacelights. Kino Flo Lighting’s Image L80 photometrics and control specifications are available online for download into pre-visual studio design programs and professional lighting console profiles.
Kino Flo’s Image L80 LED's includes 5 menu options. The White menu features include Dimming, Kelvin and Green/Magenta control channels. Dimming range is from .02 to 100 percent without introducing any flicker and can be adjusted in coarse or fine mode by pressing the control knob in/out. The Kelvin range is tunable from 2700K tungsten to 6500K daylight. The Green/Magenta control can be scaled from 0 to 100, where 25 = ¼ correction, 50 = ½ correction and 100 = full correction.
In the Gels/Hue menu, the Kelvin range is extended to 2500K Kelvin to 9900K daylight and a fourth channel is called Gel. The Gel channel includes Kino Flo presets such as blue & green screen, sodium vapor, mercury vapor as well as over 100 well-known lighting gels. The gel function can be applied to any Kelvin temperature and by pushing the control knob in/out, the gel will be applied or removed. A fifth channel called Hue Angle (Hue) and sixth channel Saturation (Sat) are also included in the gel menu. These two channels behave similar to a traditional color wheel, where white light is in the center and Hue Angle determines the color along a 360-degree range and Saturation determines how much color is applied. With the Hue Angle and Saturation it is possible to create over 2 million color combinations!
The RGB color menu gives individual control of red, green and blue LED’s. The RGB mode is a great way to work with apps with predetermined RGB presets or color wheels. RGB menu is also a great feature to dial in specific gel RGB values or when controlling colors from a DMX desk.
The FX (Effects) menu introduced on June 1, 2018 provides access to popular effects such as Candle, Fire, TV, Police, Lightning, Paparazzi, Pulse and Scroll. When on the desired effect, there are several pre-sets as well as control parameters that can be altered. For example, in the Lightning effect there is a “Storm” and “Frankenstein” preset, but it is possible to change Rate to provide additional variation.
True Match® 4.0 Firmware update in September 2019 includes groundbreaking features: CIE xy, Camera Profiles LUTs and Color Space selection.
The CIE xy determines the color displayed by its X and Y space coordinates. For example, with a handheld color meter like the Sekonic C-800, users can obtain a CIE xy reading from any light source and input the CIE xy coordinates into the Kino Flo LED fixture to match colors closely.
Camera Profiles LUTs available for the following cinema cameras and more to follow: Panavsion DXL, Sony Venice, Arri Alexa, Panasonic Varicam. Kino Flo’s True Match® 4.0 firmware balances their LED lights to the cameras rather than the other way around. The Kino Flo designed tungsten and daylight LED emitters harmonize with the camera sensors even as the color temperature settings are adjusted.
The Color Space defines the RGB color space (white point and RGB primary colors) as a means of matching color points between manufacturing. Defining the color space takes the guesswork out of post-production workflow and color grading. Included in the 4.0 firmware are: rec 709/sRGB, P3 D65, rec 2020, and ESTA E1.54.
If you are interested in upgrading your Image 80/85/87 fixtures to LED’s, Kino Flo has made Upgrade kits available to convert fluorescent Image fixtures to LED fixtures with the latest True Match® LED technology that comes standard with the company’s Celeb, FreeStyle and Diva-Lite LED lights.
