Used Movers

[mitchino]

I have the opportunity of regular repeat business in my studio filming bands and I'm looking again at investing in some profile spot moving heads. Looking for 8 units. I need them to be equivalent to 575W brightness. In the past I've worked with Robe Robin 600e units (supplied by the lighting designer). These units have everything I need but currently they are around £1500 used. I've also seen Robe 700e AT units at half that price with similar specs. Can anyone tell me the differences between them? Which other units from other manufacturers might fit the bill? Looking for reliability and versatility and value for money.

[Stuart91]

There's a variety of lower-cost brands available, typically chinese-manufactured, which have better quality control and support than purchasing no-name offerings direct from AliExpress. American DJ have some new models which look good, and there are various offerings from Prolight, the eLumen8 and iSolution brands.

 

I'd be wary of buying used movers, especially if you don't have experience in maintaining and repairing them. Many that you'll find on eBay etc. are ex-nightclub and have been run really hard.

 

Don't forget to factor in the cost of cabling, and control. If you are moving them around flightcases would be essential.

[alexforey]

Depends how much time you want to spend on maintenance, but UsedLighting has quite a lot of stock of ~575W or brighter movers in at the moment: https://www.usedlighting.co.uk/automated-lights

[jack2609]

I have the opportunity of regular repeat business in my studio filming bands and I'm looking again at investing in some profile spot moving heads. Looking for 8 units. I need them to be equivalent to 575W brightness. In the past I've worked with Robe Robin 600e units (supplied by the lighting designer). These units have everything I need but currently they are around £1500 used. I've also seen Robe 700e AT units at half that price with similar specs. Can anyone tell me the differences between them? Which other units from other manufacturers might fit the bill? Looking for reliability and versatility and value for money.

 

 

Hello Donald,

 

The Robe 700 E Ats are older than the Robin 600 eSpots. This is therefore likely to be why the pricing you have seen reflects this.

The 700s use a Philips MSR 700 lamp. The 600s use a Philips MSR gold 575. The 600 spots will actually be brighter units, but how big is your studio space? You might not need the extra brightness for your filming needs.

Of course, being older units the 700s are bigger and heavier, but again this might not be a problem for you if they are fairly permanent within the same space. I guess it will all come down to how much money you can save for the quality of light achieved.

 

Feature set wise the 700s offer pretty much everything the 600s do. CMY mixing, fixed colour wheel. rotating and fixed gobo wheels, iris, zoom (the 700s are a little wider in the beam). The 700s also have an animation wheel, which I am sure you could put to good use.

 

 

A.C. Entertainment Technologies actually have a pretty large stock holding of used lighting fixtures. Perhaps less helpful is that, currently, not all of this stock shows on our clearance website, this is something that we are currently working on.

 

Specifically we have 2 X Robe Colorspot 700 E ATs (in cardboard) at £500 each ex VAT.

We also have things like 4 X Martin Mac 2000 Profiles (in flightcases) at £800 each ex VAT.

 

Of course, this isn't the 8 units you were looking for, but as mentioned, we have quite a varied selection available, feel free to give me a call and perhaps I can help put together a flexible bespoke package for you.

All of our second hand equipment will have been serviced by us and will come supplied with a 90 day warranty.

 

Regards

Jack

[paulears]

Old ex-hire units of any make are rarely good deals. No hire company disposes of perfect stock. More likely they're the ones that seem to always be in bits. Nothing wrong with them when they were new, but before they become scrap, they'll be sold off. The idea of giving used lighting 700 quid for something that they have sourced for resale is a bit scary. It's not pocket money pricing, and the use of stock images doesn't remotely portray the real condition of the unit. At half that, they could be worth a punt, but for that money there are plenty of brand new Chinese products sold by real UK dealers with full warranties that do very similar things - and you would still have these working in a year. Can you say that with a second hand one? You see plenty of Chauvets, American DJs and others with UK sources. Pay by credit card and get protection.

 

I'm a firm believer in buying direct though - even from Aliexpress/Alibaba because my experiences have been very good, as long as you buy at least one spare to cover the gap while any new parts come.

 

For a second hand, big name, popular mover from ANY second hand dealer, it must be cheap - you'll get from the better ones a warranty of some kind, but be aware that some second hand dealers know very little about the products they shift and might be unable to fix them, and others might struggle with what is called customer service. Some of course are good and reputable - but they're selling cast-offs. If a hire company has reliable stock that they can still hire out without service issues, why on earth would they sell them? Maybe they have an entire line they've just replaced with brand new, and need the money, so sell off an entire line of older ones. Some will be good, some maybe not so. Imagine you are a hire company. At what point do you clear a line out? Usually when in general, their income stream starts to dry up, often because of increased service costs.

 

I've bought old hire stock, and I shall never do it again.

[alistermorton]

You might clear out a line because, although they may work fine, they're no longer the zippy kid on the block that everyone wants, because smaller, faster, cooler running LED fixtures are available that fit in a smaller footprint.

[Jivemaster]

From days (well years) of working in an industrial photo studio, having a set of lights ready rigged is probably the last thing you want. The pictures soon have that "samey" look about them, and people soon see the same patterns of lighting in the videos.

 

Look for pairs of lanterns, some spots some floods and some clever movers, then learn all the possible ways of rigging them and driving them. The first essential is to take the rig down at the end of a shoot then rig something different for each shoot.

[mitchino]

Thanks for all the input so far. The lights won't be permanently rigged, but will not be leaving the studio building. I will be rigging a bespoke lighting set up for each act. Of course some of it might look a bit similar, but so does most of the stuff on Jools Holland. I have a lot of other film lights (fresnels etc) already to make pretty things to sit in the background. At the end of the day though it's about the music, not the lights, and these are mainly cover and function bands. It's quite low-end stuff, but I'm trying to give these bands a video that looks a bit BBC at a bargain price.

 

The studio is 5m high and 30ft wide, the throw for the spots is max 8-10m so I guess I don't need mega powerful heads.

 

I've been looking at a lot of the cheaper new stuff, from the brands that usually get a lot of negativity on this forum, and I like the look of some of the (ahem) Showtec stuff, the Phantom 130 spot looks good, and the Shark zoom wash one. I know these are dj units, but they might well do for what I want to achieve. I can also buy them from Thomann and get their 3 year warranty.

 

(Cowers in corner, ready for kicking...)

[paulears]

No - I think you're right on the ball. Let's be honest - these kinds of lighting are for looking at, not illumination. Make sure you buy one more of each one than you actually need - it's always handy as a hot spare.

 

I bought 6 90W led movers, and I have to say they're bright - easily the same as the 575W discharge older movers I had. With LED lighting the actual light levels on stage are much higher than they were with tungsten - especially when coloured. Those makes you mention with a 3 year warranty I'm positive will do the job. Looking back at panto over the past few years - Robe 700s always seem to be in the show reports - failed again, and again - until they get swapped out. Is there any brand or model of mover that is 100% reliable? I doubt it.

[timsabre]

I did a lot of work for a lighting company that had robe 700at and they were pretty reliable, but they're an old fixture now and are almost certainly overkill for what you want. They are fairly enormous and heavy as well. I agree with Paul, a larger number of cheap fixtures will look better for you. Get a good hazer to show the light beams up as well.