When lighting conditions aren't optimal, the camera compensates by adding gain. This lightens up the picture no end, but the picture soon starts getting noisy. You can live with a certain amount of noise, and you can get de-noise software to clean up the image in post. But having adequate lighting to start with is by far the better option.

I've achieved great results indoors in the past by relying on natural sunlight through windows, and using a reflector as a fill light the other side of the subject. As long as the sunlight isn't too harsh to start with, it's an excellent option. After that, I've tended to defer to halogen lighting, using mini redhead lights with a combination of barn doors to steer and shape the light, and soft boxes to diffuse it. But these lights get hot, they draw a lot of power, they take an age to set up, and the bulbs blow at the drop of a hat. So I've been investigating LED lighting.

There's a problem, though, and there's a reason the pros have stuck with halogen for so long. Halogen is a nice continuous light, reasonably even, and easy to work with. You know that you're always going to get faithful colours.

LED lighting, on the other hand, is a very harsh light and is not a continuous light source. It's missing key colours and components, it's quite strong in the blue end of the spectrum, and there's is often an enormous spike in the green.

You can see it for yourself in this video, which compares one of the most expensive on-camera lights with one which, while nowhere near cheap, is at least slightly more affordable. (Sorry about the ad at the beginning, but it's worth holding on for the video). The light panels come off well in terms of lighting quality to start with, but what you'll notice at 3:35, in what is supposed to be a nice white balanced setting, is that the cheaper LCD light has a definite green cast to it.

What this means in practice is that key things are going to look wrong - in particular, skin tones. Everyone knows and understands what skin tones should look like, and everyone can see immediately when they look wrong.

It's possible to use gels to eliminate the green spike, but they end up cutting out so much of the other light at the same time that you might as well not be using anything. It's also possible to compensate in post with careful colour grading, but do you really want to end up adding that much effort to your workflow?

Personally, I would love to replace all my halogen lights with big LED panels, and replace my halogen on-camera lights with smaller, more battery-efficient LEDs. But the high powered brands that I'd trust straight out of the box cost in excess of £1000 each. Compare that with my Ianiro Lilliputs which are £150 a time - and I have five of them. Replacement is a massive investment. There are lower priced LED equivalents starting at around £300, but they are almost all Chinese imports branded by companies at the low end of the market, and I'm just not sure I'd trust them to provide a useable light output. I've already thrown away three LED on-camera lights and gone back to trusty old halogen.

There are probably many of you out there whose companies supply or maybe even manufacture LED light products for industry. If you can add to the debate, I'd love to hear from you. But based on my own experience, my conclusion this week is the not the most decisive. I love LED lighting for numerous applications, but I'm just not sure I love it for video applications yet. If you're a massive TV or film studio and you can afford to pay for the best, it's great. For the rest of us, I think we have to tread very carefully.