What kind of bulbs do stadium lights use?
Nowadays, you'll almost exclusively find LEDs. They've completely taken over new stadium builds and retrofits for a handful of solid reasons. LEDs are far more efficient, cut energy use by 60% or more compared to old tech, and last an absurdly long time—often over 100,000 hours. More importantly, they give you instant full brightness with zero warm-up time. You also get excellent color rendering for HD broadcasts, far better control over glare and light spill, and the ability to dim or flicker them for light shows. A single LED fixture can easily match the output of a 1500W metal halide while using a fraction of the power.
That said, High-Intensity Discharge (HID) lamps were the industry standard for decades and still light up plenty of older fields. You'll mostly run into metal halide bulbs, which produce a bright white light with decent color quality. A typical metal halide bulb runs between 400 and 2000 watts, pumps out 50,000 lumens or more, and was the go-to for televised games. You'll also see high-pressure sodium (HPS) bulbs, though they're less common for play these days. They're more efficient than metal halide but give off that distinct orange-yellow glow that wreaks havoc on color perception, so you usually find them in parking lots or practice fields, not the main stadium. The big downside to all HID bulbs is they take anywhere from 5 to 20 minutes to fully fire up and even longer to restrike if the power blips—a real headache when you're trying to get a game going after a delay. While you can still buy these bulbs from specialty suppliers, they're rapidly becoming legacy items as stadiums make the switch to LED.
