The LED’s work well, good output for size and weight but not a wide spread which is ok in some aspects; I like the fact that they are light and no cables
I carry the batteries on my belt with a Velcro strap when mobile’’ I had small 120 x 400 cm panels made for my tripod

we are making larger ones for your next project which we will mount on stands to replace the larger single globe jobbies

I would use a pro lighting kit (they have fluorescent for those sensitive to heat).
On camera lights are needed in a rush where it is not practical to take time to do
it right. You want your hospital/corp. shots to make the talent be seen in the best
light.

Proper lighting does several things:
1. You look more professional.
2. Your talent is more comfortable in their facial expressions when not squinting.
3. You set the mood in the background.
4. Make the hospital look like they are in control instead of the
deer caught in headlights ENG look.
5. You look more professional and worth your salary.

If you/they can afford the LED lights mentioned from farss you'll need two at least.

To follow up on RCourtney's advice, you can get a Lowel DV Creator 44 Four Light Kit from B&H for about $600 less than the single Litepanel fixture.
This still gives you money to invest in some C-stands, sandbags and other accessories.

Mike

If you go LED, definitely get something built by a pro, and definitely look at it before you buy. I have several very old (15+ years) Sunpak lights that mount on the accessory shoe. They are powered by ten 4/5A NiCads. The battery packs aren't made anymore. It kills me to use NiCads, so I tried to re-build the last pack using NiMH. Much longer life, more environmentally friendly, right? Well it would have worked except for one thing that I didn't know: NiMh cannot put out anywhere the amount of current that NiCads can produce. They do fine for digital cameras, but when you start talking about multiple amps, forget it, the internal resistance is way too high.

So, I thought, rather than throw out all those batteries, why not replace the bulb with an LED bulb? So I spent several hours at the various sites, until I found what sounded like a great bulb that plugs directly in to the MR11 plug. Supposed to be white, etc.

Well, I ended up with a dim blue bulb, unfit for any use whatsoever. I ended up ordering 10 4/5A NiCads and my lights are working great again.

So the moral of the story is that our quest to be green, while noble and good, can lead us down paths that end up wasting a lot of time and money, and creating things that don't work at all, or don't work very well. At the end of the day, as my British wife likes to say, the goal is to get the job done and make some great looking video. LED lighting clearly is working well for many people; just make sure you get the good stuff.

We also have a couple of Lightpanels Micros. Rubbish by comparison at 50% of the price of the Zylight Z90.

I'll second that, big difference in utility.

The bigger Lightpanels are better but still no control of CT and they do get a bit 'spotty' up very close due to the narrow beam of the LEDs.

I guess I never worried about CT, because I can set it on the camera instead. Only exception would be mixed light, and for that I have gels.

Litepanel 1x1s come in Spot and Flood versions. As you noted, the Spot version creates a speckled light close up (the subject gets lit by hundreds of individual spot LEDs). A bit of diffusion takes care of this easily.

Now for these hospital interviews. At this time, I would get KinoFlo DivaLites in a heart beat. Beautiful light thanks to careful, Oscar-winning design, making these far better than any other portable fluorescent light, the price is about half of a Litepanel 1x1, and thanks to the larger surface area it can often do the job of two Litepanels.

You can also change the CT anytime between Tungsten and Daylight, just swap the tubes.

These lights have been the standard for a long time (for good reason), but recently users have thought LEDs looked more hip. LEDs are easier to pack and are more compact and robust, but a light kit with the same utility as just one DivaLite is a lot more expensive.

Don't forget the CRI. KinoFlo's Trumatch lamps exceed CRI 95, which means especially people look much better.

Flolight and other budget vendors sell remotely similar fluros and LED panels for a lot less, but the light isn't nearly as good, and the difference is not trivial either for professional production.

I wasn't aware of all the LED options. Thanks all. I do have two pretty good lighting kits for regular interviews, but I'm looking for something small and quick without having to plug in if possible. Bob, with the Z90's, if I'm just doing a 4 minute interview of a doctor standing in a lab or or in his office, how many Z90's would you recommend to light one person's face/upper torso? I don't need like full 3 or 4-point lighting as with a full length, sit down interview. I'm going to be capturing very busy people that won't be allowing me the time to set up my full lighting kits in their work areas, but I don't just want hospital, flourescent lighting.

On the other hand, as I think about it, hospital flourescent lighting may not match as well with the LED's as with some of the flourescent kits that people are mentioning here. I just won't be able to set up large, plugin lighting banks in these settings, that is why I was originally looking at the LED's.

Regarding batteries: I recently started riding electric scooters with my wife and wanted a better battery than the sealed lead acid battery that came in the first one we got. I settled on LiFePo4 batteries. Expensive, but worth it - low weight, small, environmentally friendly, low internal resistance. Performs every bit as well as the SLA battery (at least as much torque), goes almost twice as far between recharge (with smaller physical size), and should last many more years. They should be great for lights.

I bought it from China from a very helpful and conscientious vendor. He can put together the individual cells to form a wide variety of voltages and package shapes/sizes - no extra charge for changing the shape. His prices are among the lowest on ebay - all-in-all, a good deal.

Here's the ebay link for my 36v battery:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=220302643926

If you can't find one for 12 volts from him, you can send him an email to request a price.

"hospital flourescent lighting may not match as well with the LED's as with some of the flourescent "

Fluro lights in hospitals should be pretty good actually. It's one place where accurate color rendition can be very critical. With the wrong sort of lighting staff might miss the patient being the wrong color.
Regardless you can match the Z90 to any color including fluros witha bad green spike.

If you just want general ligting, fluro lights are much cheaper but they're kind of hard to mount on a camera! You can battery power anything really. It's just a question of how big the batteries you're going to need are. Our Joker Bug 200W can be run from 4x Li Ion brick batteries, great lights but both they and those batteries are very expensive. They are mounted on camera by some crews for use as outdoor fill.

How many Zylight Z90s would you need?
Most people seem to be just buying one for ENG/EFG use. You can run them from anything from 9V to 20V so any camera battery that can deliver 30W will do. Very good match with EX1/3 and the bigger ENG cameras. The Z90 is heavy as on camera lights go, not the thing you'd use with a HC9 kind of camera.
Still you could create a kit of 3, that'd be a very small, easy to carry kit that'd provide enough light for most things. However keep in mind it's a 30W LED so you get about as much light as a 100W tungsten lamp i.e. not a huge amount of light.

I also just found this company:
http://www.nila.tv/
No idea what they cost. Looks like they'll deliver serious amount of LED light.

Bob.

Fluro lights in hospitals should be pretty good actually. It's one place where accurate color rendition can be very critical. With the wrong sort of lighting staff might miss the patient being the wrong color.

I managed to stay out of hospitals on my trips to Oz (in spite of riding stock saddles all day through very difficult terrain, btw my hat off to whoever designed this saddle type as it's much better than Western saddles for terrain riding), so I can't speak for that. Here in the U.S. though we are in 14th place (or is it 37th place?) when it comes to health care, so you'd be lucky to find high-CRI tubes in the ER department rooms and in a few doctor's offices. You typically won't find them in corridors and at nurse's desks, and even when they use "daylight" tubes" you're looking at a CRI of 85 to at best 90. The difference between 85 and 95 or even between 90 and 95 is quite significant, when it comes to rendering skin especially. And the related problem, as Bob mentioned in passing, the green spikes can only be partially reduced with filters. Better bring your own light and overwhelm the ambience.

Now, for the love of God, please don't try to do all your lighting with an on-camera light.

"Deer caught in headlights ENG look" barely begins to describe it.

You can shoot beautiful interviews in a hospital with only one DivaLite and a reflector for fill.

It will look vastly better than anything short of several $2,000 Litepanel LEDs, and the DivaLites are designed for exactly this.

If, after that, you want to get the last 1% of finesse, add a twinkle in their eyes with a small eye light.

I recall when I started doing lighting for DV a long time ago, I also thought I'd see how far I could get with on-camera lighting, at that time a Cool-Lux 2000 with a variety of diffusers and globes for different uses, "as used by NASA." I still have that light, but only use it for specialty backfill (hair light in some situations, etc.).

Soft light looks way classier than hard light. Softness comes not from any particular lighting technology, it comes only from the large size of the light source.

Softboxes obviously work well, but they have very rapid light fall-off, they use a lot of power, they get hot, they take up a lot of space in tight offices, and they provide good exercise for the person putting them up and taking them down.

Currently, in December 2008, if you want a truly professional-looking softlight for interviews, at a reasonable price. fluros are the way to go. The few extra couple of hundred dollars you spend on a DivaLite vs. say a Flolight, pay off immediately with better images, not to mention absence of repairs, and insanely great accessories that may come in handy for you too later.

Coursedesign,
I agree... I should have made it clear at the beginning that I'm not looking to use the LED's to use on-camera. I'm looking for its quick in/quick out capability. Right now when I conduct interviews, I typically set up an Arri 650W Fresnel for key light, Lowel Pro-light for backlight, and I have a few other lights or a reflector for fill if I use it. But I'm not a full-time pro, and it takes me a while to set them up, and I KNOW that this won't work if I'm in the hospital regularly.

I was picturing doing what Bob mentions above: setting up a few of something like the Z90's at close quarters to quickly get sufficient lighting for my cameras (I'm looking to pick up an EX 1 or 3 for this job, and I currently have a V1U). And if I'm in an unusual location such as a hospital hallway or lab, the last thing I want to do is be threading power cords around. I'd love to have a battery pack, a few lights on a stand, jump right into the interview, pack up and get out of their way. The hospital wants this for press releases for upcoming special projects they want publicity for, but I've taped at this hospital before, and the doctors are polite but aren't going to let me take an hour to set up lighting and sound before I record them.

I emailed the company that sells the Nila lights to see what they sell for. That may be an option.