Lightfair 2006 was full of new products for retail lighting applications. In the annual New Product Showcase, top honors went to Peerless Lighting (Berkeley, Calif.), for its Parallels® system, which is free of cables, cord and metal housing and has no integral ballast. Dreamscape Lighting Mfg. (Los Angeles) won the Design Excellence Award for NALU, a sculptural formed illuminator for architectural or landscape applications. And Philips Lighting (Somerset, N.J.) took home top honors with the Technical Innovation Award for Equos, a ZigBee-compatible dimmable ballast that offers wireless control for up to 65,000 nodes in a mesh configuration.

Lighting designer Leslie Davis, with Auerbach Glasow Lighting Consultants (San Francisco) and a speaker at this year's International Retail Design Conference, attended Lightfair and shares her thoughts on some trends at the show:

How Small Can You Go?

Designers and retailers desire smaller, energy-efficient light sources to meet the current energy codes while maintaining the smaller scale of recessed and track fixtures. One such noteworthy new product is the 20 watt ConstantColor CMH Precise™ MR-16 ceramic metal halide lamp from GE Consumer & Industrial Lighting (Cleveland), which received the Best of Category Award for conventional lamps. It comes in 12-degree spot and 25-degree flood beam spreads.

Vossloh-Schwabe (Lawrence, Pa.) introduced the Mini-Slim electronic ballast, which is half the size of the industry standard, for operating the 20, 39 and 70 watt CMH lamps from GE and Osram Sylvania (Danvers, Mass.). Advance (Rosemont, Ill.) showed its e-Vision® series of electronic compact ballasts for low-wattage ConstantColor ceramic metal halide lamps by Philips.

Track lighting manufacturers took advantage of the smaller lamps and ballasts. Con-Tech Lighting (Northbrook, Ill.) displayed a 20 watt MR-16 ceramic metal halide track head with vertical ballast. The cast-aluminum track head offers 180-degree vertical rotation and 350-degree horizontal rotation with lockable aiming. Halo (part of Cooper Lighting, Peachtree City, Ga.) introduced a sleek cylinder in the Synchro family that can be adapted for use on its flexible track, Power-Trac and architectural track lines and RSA busway.

Cee Lite (Lansdale, Pa.) offered an expanded range of its light emitting capacitor (LEC). The flat, flexible LEC panels can be used for backlighting retail displays without needing the depth to create the lightbox required for fluorescent lamps.

Green and Energy-Efficient

The growing interest in environmentalism and energy-efficiency was also noticeable at Lightfair.

Ballast introductions included Advance's Optanium 2.0®, a next-generation electronic ballast designed to optimize T8 lamp performance; GE's UltraStart programmed-start ballast combining energy-efficiency and faster starting when used with occupancy sensors; and the EcoSystem dimming ballast from Lutron Electronics (Coopersburg, Pa.) for T5 lamps, which integrates daylighting, occupant-sensing and load-shedding.

Philips expanded its Alto linear fluorescent family with the Energy Advantage™ Long Life 25 watt T8 System that can be operated on any instant-start ballast. Osram Sylvania introduced the Capsylite E-Pro™ 35 watt lamp, with a life of 4500 hours, a replacement for the standard 50 watt halogen PAR.

Lots of LEDs

When I first walked into Lightfair, the booths seemed to shout “LEDs.” More hype or real new product introductions? I found both.

GELcore, a joint venture between GE and EMCORE, introduced a reach-in low and medium temperature refrigerated display case lighting system that is mounted to the mullions. The product is rated at 50,000 hours of life and contains no IR, UV or mercury content.

The patented Lexel™ solid state technology from TIR Systems Inc. (Barnaby, B.C.), which won the Best of Category Award for systems, uses 50 percent less energy than traditional incandescent sources and it produces almost no heat and no UV component. Lighting Services Inc (Stony Point, N.Y.) won the Best of Category Award for downlights, wallwashers and accent lights for its LumeLEX™. The unit offers dimming control and the ability to change color temperature at the track head.

Leslie Davis is a senior associate with Auerbach Glasow Lighting Consultants in San Francisco. She has more than 25 years of experience in design, manufacturing and education in the lighting industry. See her presentation, “Watts in Store Redux: Retail Lighting Update,” at this year's IRDC, held September 6-8. For more information, visit www.irdconline.com.