Much of what you see on these beginners’ guides relates to conventional lanterns fed from dimmer racks. Over the past decade or so LED technology has started to be adopted in more and more
venues.

Let’s look at some pros and cons.

The advantages of LED technology include lower power consumption, so cheaper and more eco friendly to run, and an ability to include the colour selection for your light within the lantern, or fixture, itself.

If you are involved in equipping a new venue, or doing a major re-vamp of an existing one (we spent some of the last year’s lockdown doing that!) it’s probably the way to go. After all, what’s not to like?
Well like all magic bullets and new technology there are some drawbacks. The introduction of LED lanterns into an existing venue as additions, (rather than as a complete replacement rig) creates a wiring nightmare. The existing rig probably has 15a outlet sockets fed from dimmer rack channels to fade up individual lanterns as required. These are no use to you with your new LED lantern, and you will need to install a switched mains feed AND a DMX feed to every position where you want to hang your new lanterns. And bearing in mind that DMX has to be arranged as a daisy-chain there’s going to have to be an in and an out DMX socket at each position, and the means of linking these two together when no lantern is present.
With your old control system you used to use one channel (probably of DMX) per lantern, but now you will, almost certainly, have to let each fixture have at least 4 channels of DMX. (red, green, blue, white….and maybe a master fader channel too). So suddenly your desk isn’t big enough and you need one more capable of controlling all these channels.
And while we’re about it have you noticed that your lantern is going to cost you at least 3 times as much as a broadly similar conventional one? (There are few LED fixtures that are truly the equivalent of their old fashioned predecessors yet… and the good ones are at the really top end of the price range.)
Of course you’ll save money on your electricity bill (well not much actually, because stage lighting is only ever a tiny percentage of the overall consumption of a venue because of it’s short duration) and on colour (seriously? How often do you really buy more than a tenner’s worth of colour filter?). And you’ll be saving the planet (By scrapping existing working equipment and causing a factory somewhere to make new?) It will be safer because you won’t have to go up a ladder to re-colour for different shows (But unless you bite a really big bullet and install movers, or at least units with motorised shutters and so on you’ve still got to focus.)
In short:- ‘Should you add some LED gear to your existing rig?’
Well maybe, but see the caveats above.
‘Should you replace your existing rig with LED gear?’ Probably, IF you have a good sized budget to work from AND IF your presentational style will benefit from the intense colours that LED makes available. (Believe me, for popular musical events you won’t beat a rig of colour changing movers. For straightlaced classical music, or ‘serious’ worthy drama it will be a waste of money.)

So if you’re only doing ‘drinks table behind sofa’ straight plays the answer may be ‘not yet, wait for prices to come down’.