CEDIA Expo 2025 in Denver in early September was fantastic–and this from a guy who was not all that thrilled to go. It can be challenging for a service business like ours to compete for attention on a show floor packed with giant booths from multi-national multi-billion-dollar companies showcasing jaw-dropping products, but I walked away from the show encouraged and energized about the home lighting category. I am already looking forward to next year to see if this year’s lighting trends continue to grow.
I did not have time to visit every lighting manufacturer’s booth and dig deeply into their offerings, sadly, but here are three trends at CEDIA Expo that should be encouraging to all of us: offerings are getting better, products are getting smaller and the playing field is growing more colorful.
2025 CEDIA-Channel Lighting Trends
Smaller
There are a few tradeoffs to smaller light fixtures such as increased difficulty in maintenance and potential glare issues, but it is still fun to see fixtures getting smaller and smaller.
- Proluxe’s Minuet fixture impressed us online; in person it is “even smaller” according to Kelli, one of our Studio Leaders. We love making linear LED disappear, and Minuet, an encapsulated all-in-one solution, gets pretty darn close.
- PureEdge showcased a recessed track system that, when mudded in, shows up as a mere ¼”-inch wide slot. That’s very small, but the magnetically-attached fixtures are still capable of pushing out 700 lumens, an impressive feat. This system would be great where clients want to display art collections.
- Liteline’s Dine fixture family is a remarkably affordable modular recessed downlight family that has an enviably small price tag. In a category where downlights regularly top $500 and even $1000 per unit, a sub-$200 retail adjustable fixture that performs well will solve a lot of budget problems.
Better
The lighting category as a whole has been on a multi-year race to the bottom, leading to million-dollar homes stuffed with $8 disc/wafer lights that bleed glare in every direction. While the custom integration channel has a well-established reputation for the absolute best in audio, video, networking, and more, that reputation has yet to be earned in lighting, but this year’s show floor was packed with significant improvements. Here are just a few:
- REVI, a low-voltage infrastructure from Environmental Lights, showcased a new lineup of performance downlighting fixtures from Lightheaded, a well-respected fixture manufacturer based in Canada. Together, the REVI backbone and Lightheaded downlights make a formidable low voltage solution without compromising quality in on either end of the system.
- DMF released its premium trims for the popular Artafex 2” and 4” downlights after several years of development, and the graphite finish is extremely handsome. The new trims should position the 2” product to compete with just about any luxury downlight on the market.
- Lucetta showcased a new lens-on-a-roll solution for linear LED strips and channels, solving the visible seam problem for continuous runs.
More Colorful
Tunable white fixtures should someday become the norm, but the technology is still relatively new the consumer. More color – and smarter color – was evident in many booths and should make the future easier to achieve.
- AiSPIRE (WAC) showcased tunable-white Ventrix slot fixtures and a full slate of color technologies in a single Quartus platform. Ventrix is a very cool product that can now play well in warm-dim or tunable-white scenarios, and our designers are thrilled. Quartus brings fixed white, warm-dim, tunable-white, and full RGBTW color technologies to a single downlight family, making mix-and-match across a project easy – and the price points are disruptively affordable.
- Kolortune from Vantage was on display in the Proluxe booth, paired with Proluxe’s new RGBWWW linear. Yes, that’s three w’s, for a three-chip wide-range tunable additional to the RGB linear. The result is six chips of color mixed intelligently to just about any color temperature; Kolortune and the new chipset work together to also keep the light closer to the black body curve. That’s getting a little geeky, but it means that color fidelity is getting better than ever – at virtually any color.
- Exterior lighting was also in the full-color spotlight from manufactures including Garden Light, Oleo, and more showcasing everything from landscape spots to permanent holiday-esque lighting in every imaginable hue. Why not have a little fun outside?
We heard from many of our integrator partners that the lighting category was making up for small revenue declines in traditional categories like two-channel stereo or televisions, and this reality contributed to a very positive vibe throughout the show. If you haven’t been to CEDIA Expo in a while, or haven’t wandered back to the Lighting Pavilion, you might be missing some of the most exciting trends in the industry. Yeah, I know, those 100-million-inch LED video walls are pretty hard to pass up.
