The trick to LED panels is not the color temp but the completeness of the color spectrum.
There is an increasing number of LED panels that tune out the blueish nature of an LED with some sort of filter and it appears to work when you set the color temperature. But then you look closer and the blues at actually dimmer than the average light.
I haven't reviewed the topic recently but here's a wiki page on the Color Rendering Index.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_rendering_index
Since I'm seeing these CRI issues show up on network TV broadcast I suspect it's not all that simple to get what you really need.
My suggestion is make sure there is generous return policy and arrange a test right after you buy.
--
Phil Agur
“Imagination is more important than knowledge..." -- Albert Einstein
I can't be certain of the way these alter colour temp Phil. As far as I can work-out - they have white and yellow LED in them and they alter the brightness of the individual colour LED to tune the kelvin.
They go in 50k increments via an LCD panel or remote control from 3000 up to 7000 - you don't need to put gels or colour filters on the front. They do have a diffuser panel I think to soften it a bit.
Phil is not talking about colour
temperature - that is almost trivial to correct with gels.
Color
rendering is the major problem with the vast majority of LEDs (see Phil's link above).
The problem with notionally white LED sources (no matter what their colour temperature, even White + Amber ones) is that their spectrum is discontinuous: there are some colours that they essentially simply don't emit. No amount of gelling, or colour correction, or tweaking the white-amber LED balance is going to get those colours back for you.
They might look 'white' of whatever colour temperature to the eye or even to a camera, but there will be some colours/tones that they are incapable of rendering.
If you work in black and white, or if you rarely need to do colour-critical work (product or clothing, for example), this might not be a problem to you.
Like Phil, I regularly notice CRI problems due to LED lighting on TV, and also in my own theatre lighting work. Sometimes it matters, sometimes it doesn't. Likewise, some people notice it and others don't.
I did buy them plus a third slightly smaller one. Factory direct is like USD680 each... not cheap! I'll post how they are when they arrive. I'm mostly concearned with tuning them to my other studio lights - I have some very big CFL fluoro and a lot of old red head tungstens...
Good LED sources with a relatively high CRI are still always very expensive. This will change over the coming years, naturally.
I wouldn't personally want to try to match LED with two other very different kinds of light source. As above, matching colour temperature will not be too difficult (though you are likely to lose quite a lot of light via colour correction filters (gels)), but matching three different sources well is considerably more effort than matching only two.
All that said, LED lighting (particularly brightness and CRI) is coming on and improving quite quickly these days. It's possible that your new ones will be much better!
Have fun!
