This is a brilliant use of materials, and a clear design improvement over its predecessor. Lighting designers Ingo Maurer and Theo Möller have designed the Blow Me Up, an inflatable lighting fixture:
I currently have standard fluorescent lighting fixtures as
house lighting in my photography studio, and the Blow Me Up is such a vast
improvement over those. Consider that those fluorescent fixtures are metal, making
them heavy; for safety’s sake they must be hung with chains connected to eye
bolts mounted in the ceiling crossbeams, which limits their placement. On top
of that the glass fluorescent bulbs are fragile, and anytime the large lighting
boom is used in the studio, great care must be taken so as not to strike the
fixture and potentially shatter a bulb.
These inflatable lights could be hung anywhere in the studio using string and screws with anchors. If the boom strikes them, there’s no danger of falling glass shards. And they are of course easier to ship and transport than fluorescent bulbs.
The downside is that the lights are a bit pricey, ringing in at €240 (USD $284) for a single 180cm (about 6’) fixture.
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Surprisingly for an Info Maurer product, the price is actually *almost* reasonable at $330 in the US. (I called their NYC store and asked; available in about a month.) Check out the specs: 3000K CCT for a nice warm-bright, and CRI >90 for very good to excellent color accuracy. LED strips with those specs are still wickedly expensive, at least if they have high-quality LEDs and not cheap chinese crap diodes. Heck, it's still almost impossible to find T8's with those specs. Plus the ingenious and playful design. I like it. I can't afford it, but I really like it.
Agggh. Edit button, where are you? (Ingo, not info.)
LuminAID, an inflatable LED light for which this concept is ALMOST a carbon copy, has been around for at least 4 years and incorporates a social mission directly into their business model.
Very clever. Love the attention to user experience detail by using magnetic connectors and proximity sensor for on/off. Wouldn't mind a couple in my studio.