The Obsessive Quest for the World's Sharpest LED Spotlight

SCOTT ROSENFELD IS the lighting designer for the Smithsonian American Art Museum and its Renwick Gallery. It's his job to make the art look amazing. He takes this very seriously and spends untold hours pondering how light affects artwork and people's interaction with it. So when the Renwick closed for a complete renovation two years ago, Rosenfeld jumped at the chance to overhaul its lighting system.

Even before the renovation started in 2013, Rosenfeld had been experimenting with LEDs in collaboration with the Department of Energy. He was looking for something that would work with existing fixtures, shine brighter than conventional halogens, and offer greater precision in illumination. Most of all, the lights had to preserve the artworks' true colors. [We don`t want the lighting to obscure what our visitors are looking at," Rosenfeld says.

But if he was going to replace the lights in the Renwick with LEDs, he wanted to do it right. And nothing he'd tested had made the cut.

Rosenfeld was committed to using LEDs in large part because they are so efficient. In a place like the Renwick, which uses 962 lights to illuminate one of the most extensive collections of contemporary American craft, that savings adds up. Beyond energy savings, LEDs last a lot longer, too---as long as 25,000 hours, compared to no more than 4,000 for halogen and incandescent lights. They`re also available in a range of beam widths, allowing Rosenfeld to explore a broader array of lighting configurations.

But LEDs aren't perfect. Over time, many of the lights Rosenfeld tested shifted from clear white to yellowish. That`s unacceptable when your job is to reveal an artwork`s true colors and textures. Some of the bulbs flickered. And Rosenfeld found the color shift could occur in as little as a few months, rendering bulb longevity moot.

But even the best bulbs came up short in one specific area. The five controllable properties of light, says Rosenfeld, are form, distribution, movement, color, and intensity. The first four he could achieve with LEDs. But without a narrow spotlight, Rosenfeld lacked the ability to direct intense light exactly where he wanted to.