Hold on, HMIs are not incandescents

You are quite right, my mistake. I was, quite incorrectly, thinking of the halide mixed with the mercury vapor in a HMI, as opposed to the halogen around a tungsten filament in a worklight or so. The chemistry and mode of operation is so different as to be meaningless in this context, and I apologize for derailing the conversation.

It's not that I expect people to install banks of multicolored lights and tweak them endlessly, but that I disagree with you about just how peaky the LEDs are compared to CFLs. Cinematographers are hyper-picky about light and color (or should be) because the realities of both film and digital compression make it expensive and difficult to overcome a poor lighting choice after shooting has ended. LEDs have delivered considerably more convenience and predictability for small-scale lighting situations than anyone had dared hope for a few years earlier, and even when they require correction the output is consistent enough to keep the problem manageable. In short, they solve existing problems to a much greater extent than they create new ones. They are not so peaky in practice as to interfere significantly with skin tones, clothes, makeup or hair color in realistic-looking contexts (as opposed to sci-fi or 'stagey' lighting setups). That bodes well for their deployment in more ordinary settings such as businesses and homes. It seems to me that you're attaching too much important to the raw CRI score, which is after all an abstraction of a rather nonlinear curve (http://www.ledsmagazine.com/features/2/5/4/VLambda).

Whether by mixing or doping, ISTM that the ability to get a desirable result under demanding conditions with relative ease means that providing a broadly acceptable standardized product for the general consumer is a lot more feasible. Once again I am not claiming it's perfect. There are still problems, especially for film where you can't tweak the color balance during production, just as you can't tweak the colors of paint, wallpaper or furniture in the home. There's a comprehensive set of Macbeth charts at the AMPAS lighting project pages: http://www.oscars.org/science-technology/council/projects/ss... and http://www.oscars.org/science-technology/council/projects/ss... Despite the peakiness and pink tinge of the the multi-emitter 2 sample, and the slight darkening of the blended phosphor, you can see that they are quite close to the incandescent alternative on a range of colors. This is what I'm talking about: if you're concerned with perfect color fidelity - as you should be if you are, say, shooting a commercial that uses a well-known logo, or trying to provide accurate representations of nature, textiles, or artworks - then there are still shortcomings. If you do not need forensic-level quality, and most of the time you don't, then LEDs are an increasingly viable substitute. The biggest problem for the Academy is one of scale; what works in a medium close-up in an average size room is one thing, but when you get onto a soundstage (which you would use 5kw or 10kw incandescent lights to illuminate), then you have a whole different set of problems, and the deficiencies of LEDs are significantly magnified. That's not an issue for consumers, though, since few of them have floodlights installed :)

I'm not invested in any LED lighting companies, I'm just telling you that I've had very good experiences with the technology so far. Given the fact of the regulatory changes, which I am neutral about, LEDs seem much more likely to deliver the desired results than CFLs.