Stadium Lights

Stadium lights are ideal for use in outdoor sporting events, including soccer stadiums, football fields, baseball stadiums, athletic fields, racetracks, basketball courts, tennis courts, and track and field arenas. In addition to sports stadiums, these lights can be used for outdoor concert venues, race tracks, and other large outdoor areas. 

Stadium lights can also be used in a variety of indoor settings such as indoor theaters, newsrooms, broadcasting rooms, and for indoor sports. Light fixtures with advanced LED technology are equipped with efficient heat sinks for greater heat dissipation, so you don’t have to worry about your lights overheating as long as they are in low-temperature indoor environments.

A well-thought-out stadium light placement should focus on achieving uniform illumination with minimal glare and shadows. This placement will depend on a few important factors. 

• The shape and size of the field
• The type of sport
• The beam angle of the stadium lights
• The number of lighting poles
  

Differently shaped sports fields will require unique light placements to create a uniform lighting distribution. For example, the approach to lighting a baseball field is different from that of lighting a soccer field due to the differently shaped fields. The IES also recommends different design factors depending on whether the sport is a ground-based sport like soccer or wrestling vs if it is an aerial sport, like baseball or volleyball. Ground-based sports require a greater horizontal illuminance to help spectators see the action on the field. Lighting for aerial sports, however, is necessary for both spectators and participants to see any playing object in the air. Aerial sports use a combination of vertical and horizontal illuminance to achieve this. Lights should not be placed in glare zones for aerial sports. 

The beam angle of a light fixture determines how widely or narrowly the light is spread out from the source. A wide beam angle can cover a larger area but may need to be mounted closer to the field. This makes wider beam angles of 45-60 degrees suitable for general area lighting and for use with shorter mounting poles. Narrow beam angles, typically around 15-30 degrees, focus the light to deliver higher-intensity illumination over specific locations like the pitch, court, or field. Field lights with narrower beams can be mounted from higher mounting points farther away from the field.

The number of mounting poles used to light up a stadium can have an effect on the type of beam angles needed for stadium lighting. Fields that have fewer poles, such as a 4-pole layout, may require stadium lights with a wider beam angle to make sure there is ample lighting in the stadium. Venues using an 8-pole layout may only need lights with a narrow beam angle since there are a greater number of locations where the light will come from. The individual fixtures mounted on a pole might also have different beam angles to direct light on different parts of the field. 

Advanced optics are essential in sports lighting, as they precisely direct light to make your lights more efficient. This helps enhance visual comfort for participants and spectators by reducing glare, minimizing bright spots, and focusing the light on specific areas around the playing field. An added benefit of advanced optics is that they reduce light pollution for sports fields in populated areas that must meet light cutoff requirements. There are two main types of LED advanced optics: single glass and secondary optics. Single glass optics employ a single-piece glass lens that covers the entirety of the LED pane to produce a consistent beam, whereas secondary optics use PC lenses to focus the beam angle of each individual LED chip to change the overall beam angle of the entire fixture. 

Yes, certain LED stadium lights are suitable for high-definition broadcasting. The best broadcast lighting comes from flicker-free LED light fixtures with a high TLCI value. TLCI, or Television Lighting Consistency Index, is a measure designed to evaluate the color rendering quality of lights used in television production. It indicates how well a light source will allow colors to appear on camera, which is vital for HD broadcasts. LEDs also offer the advantage of instant On/Off capabilities and easy dimming, which is beneficial for certain broadcast lighting scenarios.