Lutron Electronics has introduced all-new luxury architectural downlights, the Ketra D2 and Rania D2, featuring a 2” aperture downlight, diecast aluminum trims that are honed to a nearly invisible edge, a tighter control method for making micro adjustments, slimmer housing for installation, and lower price points than the predecessor Ketra D3 downlight line.
Lutron has long sought to “harmoniously bring the outdoors inside,” blending natural and electric light seamlessly while accentuating the beauty of the interior, from fabric colors and textures to art, and even the skin tones and features of those enjoying the space. With the launch of Ketra D2, users can now experience the characteristic elements of Lutron with dynamic lighting that adapts to various moments throughout the day and sets the desired ambiance, in the form of the brand’s smallest and most flexible downlight offering to-date. With both new downlights, people will experience high quality of light in any space in the home.
“Quality of light means more than just measuring color rendering index (CRI) or dimming capabilities,” said Ben Bard, VP of luxury residential business at Lutron. “It’s about a light source’s ability to perfectly replicate natural light across a wide spectrum and then maintain that exact light output over its lifetime. Ketra uniquely delivers this quality of light and it’s now available in a 2” aperture. Additionally, Rania’s unique light engine sets a new bar for white light in the industry.”
Lutron’s luxury lighting portfolio is anchored on elevating the experience and quality of light in the home. Ketra and Rania light sources work seamlessly with Lutron’s premium lighting controls and shades to create personalized spaces. Both fixtures are also wirelessly controlled, saving time and money, and reducing the space needed for panels. As the market continues to shift toward “quiet ceilings” featuring increasingly discreet recessed fixtures and a desire for consistently reliable lighting performance, the D2 represents one of the most versatile and advanced architectural lighting solutions to-date.
While Ketra D2 retains Ketra’s reputation for providing quality of light and unique experiences for homeowners, along with the new 2” aperture, new of trims and colors, ultra-slim housings for maximizing ceiling heights, and a new hot aiming system, the new Rania line provides more options to designers, integrators, and homeowners that want more flexibility in their lighting.
According to Lutron, Rania is second only to Ketra in its ability to replicate natural white light more faithfully than any other light source. For example, Rania D2 includes a three-channel emitter that is designed to produce a range of white light from incandescent warmth to midday sun — all in a single light engine. To enable designers to mix and match Rania D2 and Ketra D2 within a lighting layout, both lines utilize the exact same slim housings, architectural trims, refined hot aiming system, and wireless communication.
Taken together, Lutron says, these products open new possibilities for builders, designers, and custom home integrators who deliver innovative lighting experiences to homeowners and transform residential spaces with the highest quality of light.
During a dealer, designer, and press preview of Ketra and Rania D2 at Ketra’s design and manufacturing facilities in Austin, TX this week, the Lutron management team provided a deep-dive into the new innovations, providing hands-on demos and insights into the development of the products.
Rick Walsh, senior product manager at Lutron, said the goal of D2 was to reimagine, reengineer, and redesign every detail of “this type of fixture,” creating “something quieter, more artful, and more precise than we’ve ever done before.”
Walsh explained that the new D2 downlight is a completely modular platform with interchangeable parts and pieces to adapt to the needs of the space. “We had to make amazing breakthroughs in optical technology to create a smaller aperture to allow the fixture to disappear into the ceiling,” he said. “We’re bringing forward meticulously diecast aluminum trims that are honed to a fine knife-edge, invisible edge painted to maintain a smooth flush-to-ceiling appearance, so you can harmonize a ceiling’s aesthetics with the design and feel of the space.”
Ketra D3 was designed as a “tool-less” fixture when it came to aiming and adjusting beam angles. With the smaller aperture of D2, designers felt that using a commonly available tool would provide installers with a tighter control method for aim and focus, enabling hot aiming (aiming while the fixture is turned on) and lockable positioning that makes micro adjustments more ergonomic and intuitive.
“This is something that really allows you to leverage Ketra’s TruBeam optics, so the light ends up where you need it and nowhere else,” Walsh said.
Lutron also introduced a new line of lens accessories to allow designers and installers to position the light either at the optic or at the trim — two lenses can be used to refine beam control.
Walsh explained that the goal of providing two different “ultra-slim” housings was to address construction challenges, particularly in MDU buildings where ceiling space is often at a premium. “One is a 2” high fixed for wall-wash housing for those ultra-slim applications, and [the other is] a 3.5-inch high adjustable housing to get the right fixture in the right spaces despite the tight construction tolerances.”
Ketra D2 is more affordable than the existing D3 line with the adjustable fixture listed at $950 and fixed at $850 list.
As for Rania D2, the goal, Walsh reiterated, was to “make the essential aspects of this [lighting technology] even more accessible to more homes, more spaces, and more projects. Things like wide CCT [correlated color temperature] range and the ability to faithfully echo an incandescent and produce naturally feeling white light.”
Walsh reminded his audience that typically today, outside of Ketra, you have to “kind of choose” between a warm dim option that lets you dim down in those quieter settings or a tunable option to bring natural light into a space.
“At Lutron, we don’t think you should have to choose,” Walsh said. “We challenged our engineering team to think differently, to think broader, to take an unparalleled and innovative approach to white light and expand that offering to our D2 platform.”
The three-channel solution, Rania D2, delivers a wide CCT range, “replicating natural white light more faithfully than any other light source other than Ketra,” Walsh said. “From incandescent warmth to mid-day sun,” Rania has a CCT range of 1800 Kelvin all the way up to 5500 Kelvin, to match that mid-day sun option, “in a single fixture, a single light engine.”
Rania leverages the same platform as the Ketra D2 so the two fixtures can be mixed and matched within the same project, matching visually and using the same Clear Connect RF wireless technology. Each fixtures is individually addressable to minimize zoning and reducing overall costs of wiring and control. Both Ketra and Rania D2 have the same beam angle options with the same tool precision aiming mechanism. Both share the same 2-inch and 3.5-inch housings. Both have those refined knife-edged trims.
The differences between Ketra and Rania are that Ketra has a CCT range starting at “candlelight” at 1400 Kelvin all the way up to an “arctic sky” 10,000 Kelvin, while Rania has a CTT range from 1800 Kelvin for “incandescent warmth” to that 5500 Kelvin for a “mid-day sun” effect. Lumen output is 1200 and 1000 for each of the Rania fixtures.
List price for Rania’s adjustable fixture is $725 and $625 for the flange model. Learn more about Rania at luxury.lutron.com
Here are more quotes and highlights from the Lutron/Ketra presentation in Austin:
Melissa Andresko, Lutron Chief Corporate Brand Ambassador: “This is the biggest Ketra product news since our acquisition [of the brand] in 2018.
Ed Blair, Lutron President: “We’re here today to tell you about what I call scalable perfection in intelligent lighting. We believe that this is the most impactful launch that maybe the company’s had since since the 2008 with the launch of Sivoia QS.”
Horace Ho, Ketra COO [in video]: “Today’s [interior] light just does not feel natural to me. A lot of people use one single color all day. That is not natural. Natural light is the sun. Natural light is moonlight. Natural light is fire light. That’s natural and that’s dynamic. It changes. [To replicate natural light] we had to build a custom imager because we needed the optical performance. We had to invent a whole host of optics to be able to do the color mixing (homogenizing white light). We also needed to design the custom integrated circuits to maintain the light [over time as the LEDs age] and also to precising control the light.
Ryan Bocock, Ketra Director of EE [in video]: “You need RBG LEDs that are spaced very far apart so you can re-create all the portions of that curve to give the dynamic feeling of natural light inside or give that firelight sensation or the sun during the day or the incandescent warm dim at night. You can’t manage RGB LEDs to do any of those features without having an intelligent light source. You can’t do any of that without driving RGB LEDs correctly.”
Cecilia Ramos, Lutron Senior Director of Architectural Market: “One of the challenges of getting very tight beam angles from mixing white out of red, green, and blue is that you oftentimes get color breakup. Lutron and Ketra have a variety of beam angles from 10, 15, 25, 40, 60, and 90 degrees, and we’ve engineered the lights to always be clean and crisp and precise.”
Ryan Bocock, Ketra Director of EE [in video]: “Inside each Ketra light source is a custom chip that is solving complex scientific equations at a 60 times per second update rate so that RGB is handled correctly. We’re the only ones correcting for aging with actual optical feedback running for life so the light stays beautiful. We won’t ship a product until every part is tested separately and together.”
Cecilia Ramos: “What is quality light? You can’t find it on a spec sheet. It can’t be defined just by CRI [color rendering index] or CCT [correlated color temperature] or TM30 [a color rendering metric], or 0.1% dimming, or even the totality of those things put together because quality light is something much bigger than that. Quality light is something that you feel. There’s something intrinsic to it. [It’s about] how close that light approximates the light delivered by a heat source. For those more technical, you might call it the light that’s along a blackbody curve.
Cecilia Ramos: With a lot of LED technologies that out there today you’re choosing between a static white light. You might be choosing between a tunable white light, [which] is essentially taking two different points perhaps on that blackbody curve and mixing them together, but those colors in between aren’t on that blackbody curve. Or you might be choosing warm dim where you basically have a brighter warm LED that dims down to a warmer dim light, but that’s not approximating that blackbody curve. Secondly, it’s all about how close it replicates the light and color temperature in natural light. Thirdly, it’s about how well that light renders all of the different colors. You want to approximate the light of the sun. You want that full spectrum of colors visible to the human eye. Having high CRI is not enough. High CRI is only telling you how well that light approximates eight different pastel colors, which is pretty reduced given what we experience today. Finally…it’s also about how well that light can maintain its performance over time. It has to be quality light that lasts.”
Cecilia Ramos: “All of our components, whether it’s the optics, the chips on the boards, the electronics behind it, those are all manufactured in-house in our facility as much as we can here in Austin. It’s not enough just to have a high-quality fixture. You also have to that same quality of control to drive that fixture and tell it what to do and those two have to work in concert, and only Ketra and Lutron together can provide that.”
