Strand Lighting 🇺🇸

📍 Dallas, Texas, USA

🏢 Founded 1914

🌍 Historic Theatrical & Broadcast Lighting

Overview Innovations Products Applications FAQs Resources

Company Overview

Strand Lighting (now a brand of Signify, alongside Vari-Lite) is quite literally the foundation of the modern theatrical lighting industry. Founded in 1914 in London’s West End, Strand manufactured the first stage lighting lanterns, invented the first theatrical lighting control console (the Light Console in 1930), and was the absolute undisputed king of television and theater lighting for over 70 years.

Today, backed by the immense technological resources of Signify (formerly Philips Lighting), Strand continues to engineer high-end luminaires and control systems specifically designed for the strict requirements of broadcast television studios, opera houses, and massive theatrical installations.

Their modern LED profiles and fresnels are renowned for their immaculate color rendering, ensuring perfect skin tones on 8K broadcast cameras. While they don’t chase the aggressive, flashing rock-and-roll market, Strand remains a highly prestigious name specified by legacy theaters and global news broadcasting networks.

Core Technologies

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Theatrical Heritage & Optics

Strand leverages over a century of theatrical lens design, ensuring their modern LED fixtures produce the exact same flat, perfectly even field of light that lighting designers relied upon with classic tungsten halogen lamps.

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Smart Color Control

Advanced internal software that allows a lighting designer to simply select a classic gel color (e.g., Lee 201) on their console, and the Strand LED fixture perfectly calculates and outputs that exact spectral wavelength automatically.

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Neo Control Consoles

A highly advanced lighting control ecosystem designed specifically for the unique workflow of theater and television. Unlike rock-and-roll desks, Neo focuses heavily on perfectly timed cue lists and complex theatrical tracking.

Featured Solutions

Leko LED Profile

The modern evolution of the classic theatrical spotlight. Available in tunable white and full-color versions, it utilizes high-end optics to project perfectly sharp patterns (gobos) onto stage sets.

Cantata LED Fresnel

A heavy-duty wash fixture used extensively in television studios. It provides a soft, incredibly beautiful wash of light that wraps around the talent’s face, utilizing a massive front lens to mimic classic studio halogens.

Vision.Net Control System

A highly scalable architectural control network. It manages all the ‘house lights’ (audience seating, lobbies, work lights) in a massive theater, integrating seamlessly with the main stage lighting console.

Ideal Industry Deployments

📺 Global News & Broadcast Studios

🎭 Legacy Theaters & Opera Houses

🏫 University Performing Arts Centers

🏛️ Civic Auditoriums & House Lighting

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the relationship between Strand and Vari-Lite?

Both legendary brands are owned by Signify (formerly Philips). Strand focuses primarily on traditional theatrical fixtures, broadcast soft-lights, and architectural control, while Vari-Lite focuses on high-end automated moving heads for concert touring. They share massive R&D resources.

What is a Leko?

The term ‘Leko’ is actually a historic brand name (like Kleenex for tissue) for an ellipsoidal reflector spotlight. Strand’s modern Leko LED continues the legacy of these fixtures, which are used to shoot a highly controllable, sharp-edged beam of light to highlight a specific actor on stage.

Why is Strand so popular in broadcast TV?

Broadcast television requires incredibly high CRI (Color Rendering Index) to ensure skin tones look natural, and absolute silence so cooling fans aren’t picked up by microphones. Strand’s century of experience in studio lighting ensures their LED engines meet these strict requirements flawlessly.