A ceiling, cove or wall that holds a real white all day and turns any color on cue. RGBW LED behind a translucent membrane, run as DMX or DALI scenes, built to any outline in our Dania Beach shop.
A color changing ceiling is a field of 24V RGBW LED mounted above a tensioned translucent membrane. The membrane is both the diffuser and the finished surface, so there is no lens, no trim ring, no grid and no fixture to look at, and that is what lets the plane read as one source instead of a row of bright lines. Light transmission through our diffused translucent membrane measured 42.0% at Poznan University of Technology using the method in CIE 130-1998. That figure is a transmission measurement, nothing more.
A color changing fixture lights a surface. This is the surface. Because the LED sits in the cavity and the membrane spans between aluminum profiles, the light source can be any outline we can bend, at any size the room allows, on a ceiling or on a wall, and it can be printed and backlit at the same time. RGBW rather than RGB is the part that matters day to day: the same ceiling that goes deep blue for an event still delivers a clean white on a Tuesday morning, from a dedicated white die instead of three colors mixed into a compromise.
RGB makes white by mixing three narrow colors. It lands near white, and that white is three narrow bands rather than a white source. We hold no CRI testing and no lumen maintenance testing of our own, so the only rendering numbers we will quote are the ones the strip manufacturer publishes for the part we specify. RGBW adds a fourth dedicated white die in the same package, at the CCT you choose. The ceiling is an ordinary white ceiling most of the year and a color ceiling when you ask. Pastels are the second reason. On RGB a soft blush means crushing three channels down to a few percent output where the stepping shows. On RGBW it means white at a comfortable drive level with a little red added, which stays smooth and stays put.
No lens, no trim, no grid line, no visible fixture. A large membrane changes color as one object, and when the color is off there is nothing on the ceiling to look at. That is what gets this specified in lobbies where the designer does not want hardware overhead, and it is why the effect reads as architecture instead of as lighting equipment.
We bend the profile ourselves, so the luminous outline is whatever the drawing says: an island, a curve, a closed ring, a logo shape, a full wall panel. The same system runs vertical. Print the membrane and it is a graphic by day and a color field at night. Nothing here is a tile, a module or a panel size we have to design around.
The rooms we install this in most. The rest of the range is on the lighting systems page.
Where one room has to read warm and neutral at breakfast and hold a brand color for a corporate booking that night, off the same ceiling and the same keypad.
Bars, lounges, nightclubs and entertainment centers, where the ceiling is the effect and there is nothing overhead to look at when the house lights come up.
Retail interiors and showrooms, including car showrooms, where the color follows the season, the campaign or the brand book.
Corporate lobbies, brand walls and broadcast or podcast studios, where ceiling and wall are both the source and there are cameras in the room.
Cycling studios, spas and treatment rooms, programmed by class or by service so the room changes with what is happening in it.
Home theaters, pool and spa enclosures, feature ceilings and kids rooms, often alongside a star ceiling on its own channel.
We build from the structure down. Ten layers, in this order.
These are shop standards, built from what we have installed and what has come back to bite us. They are not laboratory data and we will not present them as such. Treat them as the numbers we hold ourselves to on your job.
The rule we build to is cavity depth at or above 1.5 times the spacing between LED rows for RGBW. Tunable white and single color fields can run at 1.0 times, because there is only one die to blend. RGBW needs the extra depth because four separate dies have to overlap before they reach the membrane. Rows at 4 in on center want a 6 in cavity. Rows at 6 in on center want 9 in. Rows at 8 in on center want 12 in. Six inches from LED face to the back of the membrane is our hard floor for a full RGBW field, and 8 to 10 in is where fields look their best. Under 6 in we either tighten the rows and add a second diffusion layer at mid cavity, which lets us build shallower, or we tell you to use RGBW in a cove or a linear line instead of a field. We would rather lose the field than hand over a striped ceiling.
Minimum 60 packages per meter, roughly 18 per foot, for a saturated color field. Deep blue and deep red are the two states that expose sparse strip as scalloping, because you are driving one die group while the others sit dark. If the design has a deep blue scene, spec for the blue, not for the white.
Gradients, sweeps and chases need addressable pixel control, not one decoder per zone. For pixel work the rule tightens to cavity depth at or above 2 times pixel pitch, so a 2 in pixel pitch wants at least 4 in on that axis and we still hold the 6 in field minimum. Go shallower and a gradient reads as a row of dots crawling across the ceiling instead of a wash moving through it.
The outermost LED row sits at half the field spacing from the inside face of the profile. Field rows at 6 in on center means the outer row lands 3 in off the frame. Skip this and you get a dark band around the perimeter that no amount of driver output will fix.
24V constant voltage. Feed both ends past roughly 10 ft and re-inject about every 16 ft. Keep every run inside one visible zone on the same driver and the same brand of decoder. Two brands of driver on one field will match at 100% and split visibly somewhere under 10%, because their dimming curves are not the same shape.
Specify 16-bit control for any scene that fades slowly. 8-bit DMX gives 256 steps per channel, and on a large even field a two minute sunset fade at 8-bit steps visibly. Nobody notices 8-bit on a snap change. Everybody notices it on a slow one.
If the room gets filmed, and in hospitality and retail it will, specify drivers with PWM at or above 3 kHz. Low frequency PWM is invisible to the eye and lands as banding on a phone camera in slow motion. Decide this before the order, not after the opening party.
Five of those six are decided in coordination, months before we show up on site.
The white die CCT is fixed at order: 2700K, 3000K, 3500K, 4000K, 5000K or 6500K. It cannot be changed later without opening the ceiling. Pick it against the rest of the room’s lighting, not in isolation. If the white has to move across the day, specify a tunable white run at 2700K to 6500K alongside the color field and budget it up front.
Not negotiable. Drivers, supplies, decoders and DALI gear go in a closet, above a cabinet, or behind an access hatch, and that location belongs on the drawings. We give you the rack footprint early so it does not turn into a change order at rough-in.
A printed translucent membrane sits over the same RGBW field. Understand that the print’s color shifts under saturated light and will not read the way it does under white. Mock it up every time. We print a sample, backlight it in the shop, and you approve the actual thing rather than a proof on paper.
DMX512-A wants 120 ohm shielded twisted pair, daisy chained, terminated at the last device, 32 devices maximum per run, splitters where the layout needs branches. Star wiring a DMX run is the most common control failure we get called out to fix, and it is usually not our cable.
On anything over about 200 square feet, or anything with a signature color scene, build a mockup. We make a mockup box at the real cavity depth with the real strip and the real membrane, and you look at it in the real room under the real ambient light. That is the honest substitute for a photometric calculation we cannot run for you, and it settles more arguments than a spreadsheet ever has.
Because RGB does not make a white you would accept on a ceiling. Mixing red, green and blue gets you near white, but the spectrum is spiky, it renders skin and finishes badly, and it drifts as the three channels age at different rates. That is the physics of three narrow bands, not a measured result of ours. RGBW adds a fourth dedicated white die in the same package, at a CCT you pick, so the ceiling is a normal white ceiling most of the time and a color ceiling when you ask. Pastels are the other reason. On RGB a soft pink means running three channels at very low output where the stepping shows. On RGBW it means white at a comfortable level with a little red added, which is stable, smooth and repeatable from one scene recall to the next.
Our shop standard is cavity depth at or above 1.5 times the LED row spacing for RGBW, with a hard floor of 6 in from LED face to the back of the membrane on a full field. 8 to 10 in is where fields look their best. Also hold an accessible location for the drivers and control gear, keep ducts, sprinkler drops and hangers out of the luminous area because everything in that cavity casts a shadow, and give us the finished membrane plane plus the perimeter condition. Send the RCP and a section early and we will mark the cavity, the row layout, the feed points and the driver rack on it, before the ceiling gets value engineered down to 4 in.
No, and we will not pretend otherwise. We hold no LM-79, no LM-80 and no TM-21 data for this assembly, we publish no IES files for it, and we publish no lumen, footcandle or efficacy numbers. What we do hold is the membrane light transmission test report from Poznan University of Technology, 42.0% diffused and 70.5% transparent, measured by the method in CIE 130-1998. The strip manufacturer publishes their own data for the LED product itself, and we will name exactly which product is specified so you can get it from them. For anything that has to be signed off visually we build a mockup at the actual cavity depth and you look at it. On a diffused luminous ceiling that answers the question better than a calculation would.
Not on the data we hold. Our ASTM E84 results are per finish, on white specimens: gloss flame spread 5 and smoke developed 300, matte 10 and 300, satin 15 and 250. The laboratory assigned no classification. The specimens were not mounted per ASTM E2573, and the test covers the membrane alone, not a plenum assembly. So we do not permit this system in a return air plenum on this data, and we will tell your AHJ the same thing. We also hold no NFPA 701 test, no NFPA 286 or NFPA 265 room-corner test, no UL 2043 rating, no Florida Product Approval and no Miami-Dade NOA for this assembly. If your specification calls for any of those, raise it at design and we will tell you in writing what we can and cannot meet.
Both, and they are different jobs. A zoned system uses a constant voltage decoder per zone and each zone is one color at a time. That covers most hospitality and retail work: an entry field, a bar field, a cove, moving together or independently. Gradients, sweeps and video effects need addressable pixel control, more data runs, a pixel controller, and more cavity depth so the pixels blend instead of reading as dots. Decide which one you are buying at design, because the wiring is not the same and adding pixel control later means opening the ceiling.
With an engraved keypad on the wall, four to six scenes, and a lockout so nobody leaves the lobby magenta at 9am. Phone apps are useful for the designer and useless for a front desk. We can run scenes on DMX512-A with a show controller, on DALI-2 DT8 where the building already has DALI and facilities wants it in the BMS, or on a wireless mesh where pulling control cable is not realistic in a retrofit. 0-10V dims one channel and cannot do color, so it should not appear on the control drawings for this system. If there is an AV integrator we hand them a channel map and they trigger scenes from Crestron, Control4 or Savant.
What we hold today and issue on request. The published files sit in the lighting technical library, and the full set is in technical downloads.
Reserved and not yet published. Listed by name so nobody assumes it exists:
A panel manufacturer sells tiles, panels and modules that you assemble into a rectangle, sized by what their tooling already makes. A color field is not a module. We bend the frame on our own CNC and weld the membrane to fit, so the field can be a curve, an island, a closed ring, a wall or a printed graphic, at whatever size the room gives us. It arrives as one drawing set, one crew and one Florida lead time instead of a product, plus a trim package, plus a separate ceiling contractor to install it.
Our profile cross-sections, dimensions and the full color chart live in the technical library. CAD files are sent on request, usually within one business day.
View system
Send the reflected ceiling plan and a section. We mark the cavity, the row layout, the feed points and the driver rack, and price it from our own shop.
Share a few details and our team will follow up within one business day.
