Fixture Reviews

[PaulRiley]

Hi guys,

One of the venues that I help out at is looking at upgrading their lighting rig from entirely conventionals to a LED/Conventional hybrid rig. It's a largish venue, seating around 850 people and the stage is about 35'x75' I think.

At the moment, we've come up with a wishlist of what LED fixtures we would like which are:

For moving heads:

Ayrton Ghibli

Elation Artiste Picasso

Static Profiles:

ETC Source Four Series 2 Lustr*

Robe Parfect 150 RGBW

Elation Colour 5

Martin ELP-CL*

Chauvet Professional Ovation E-915FC

*These seem very similar yet the ETC is more expensive. Is there a difference between them in terms of what they're able to do or what they look like in terms of colour and white production?

Fresnels:

Chauvet Professional Ovation F-915 FC

Chauvet Professional FD-205WW

LED Battens:

GLP Impression X4 Bar 20

Chroma-Q Color Force II

I was wondering if any of you guys had any first hand experience with any of these fixtures and wouldn't mind sharing your thoughts and opinions on them. I've also tried looking up reviews online and I haven't had much luck so if you guys could point me in the right direction, that would be much appreciated.

We've arranged a demo with Whitelight but we're trying to come up with a list for when they come to visit us

Thanks for the advice!

[Stuart91]

Hi Paul,

 

It might be worth giving us an idea of what sort of events/performances you are likely to have in the venue. A fixture that is great for rock'n'roll might not be the best choice for theatrical use.

 

I've always found the moving light reviews in LSI magazine to be very informative (even if most of the products are well out of my price range). I'm not sure if any of the fixtures on your shortlist have appeared recently, but it might be worth reading a few random reviews just to get an idea of how they assess and compare the performance.

[PaulRiley]

Hi Paul,

 

It might be worth giving us an idea of what sort of events/performances you are likely to have in the venue. A fixture that is great for rock'n'roll might not be the best choice for theatrical use.

 

I've always found the moving light reviews in LSI magazine to be very informative (even if most of the products are well out of my price range). I'm not sure if any of the fixtures on your shortlist have appeared recently, but it might be worth reading a few random reviews just to get an idea of how they assess and compare the performance.

 

Hi Stuart,

 

That's a fair comment to make - I forgot to include it.

 

Many of the performances we host are theatrical in nature such as musicals, straight plays and dance shows however occasionally we have other genres in such as live music etc. We also have a yearly panto too but I know they bring some of their own lighting fixtures with them so I don't know how important that is in the considerations.

 

I will have a look at LSI and see what the reviews are like and see if any of the fixtures on our shortlist have made it into there.

 

Thanks for that!

[timsabre]

The Martin ELP-CL is brand new so I am not sure you'll find any comparisons of it. It only has 5 colours of leds - RGBAL - whereas the Lustr has 7 colours so I would expect the colour rendering of the Lustr to be better. But you probably would not be able to tell unless you had them side by side. I've used the Elation LED S4 thing which is also RGBAL and it was impressive, the light looked like gelled halogen.

[PaulRiley]

The Martin ELP-CL is brand new so I am not sure you'll find any comparisons of it. It only has 5 colours of leds - RGBAL - whereas the Lustr has 7 colours so I would expect the colour rendering of the Lustr to be better. But you probably would not be able to tell unless you had them side by side. I've used the Elation LED S4 thing which is also RGBAL and it was impressive, the light looked like gelled halogen.

 

Oh okay, I didn't realise it was brand new. I knew the Lustr was 7 colours in comparison to 5 for the Martin but from what I've looked at in their tech specs and compared them, the Martin does seem to be able to hold it's own - on paper at least.

 

I take it that the Elation which looked like gelled halogen was impressive?

[Bryson]

I got a look at the Martin last week. It's pretty good. The colour rendition is not as good as the ETC Lustrs, for sure, but it might be good enough, depending on application. They were doing some interesting things with the lens adjustments which I though were novel. (Cogged wheel for fine adjustments.)

[alistermorton]

I think we may be just down the road from you (caterham). We're looking at the same exercise - were considering the infinity fixtures as well as the ones you mentmentioned. They looked quite promising when we saw them at ABTT and Plasa.

[Charlotte_R]

I've used source 4 lustrs, and they're very good. You can also get them as fresnels. Have you considered cob pars? They look more like traditional par cans, and since I worked on a tour with them, I much prefer them to any other type of LED par.

[jack2609]

Hi guys,

One of the venues that I help out at is looking at upgrading their lighting rig from entirely conventionals to a LED/Conventional hybrid rig. It's a largish venue, seating around 850 people and the stage is about 35'x75' I think.

At the moment, we've come up with a wishlist of what LED fixtures we would like which are:

For moving heads:

Ayrton Ghibli

Elation Artiste Picasso

Static Profiles:

ETC Source Four Series 2 Lustr*

Robe Parfect 150 RGBW

Elation Colour 5

Martin ELP-CL*

Chauvet Professional Ovation E-915FC

*These seem very similar yet the ETC is more expensive. Is there a difference between them in terms of what they're able to do or what they look like in terms of colour and white production?

Fresnels:

Chauvet Professional Ovation F-915 FC

Chauvet Professional FD-205WW

LED Battens:

GLP Impression X4 Bar 20

Chroma-Q Color Force II

I was wondering if any of you guys had any first hand experience with any of these fixtures and wouldn't mind sharing your thoughts and opinions on them. I've also tried looking up reviews online and I haven't had much luck so if you guys could point me in the right direction, that would be much appreciated.

We've arranged a demo with Whitelight but we're trying to come up with a list for when they come to visit us

Thanks for the advice!

 

 

Hi Paul,

 

As the others have mentioned the best thing to do when looking to purchase new kit, whatever it is, is to to try it out in your actual venue.

 

ColorForceII is arguably one of, if not the, best theatrical cyc fixtures currently on the market which will work well for your type of shows. Just google "colorforceII reviews" and you should be able to find quite a lot of stuff. Due to the homogenized optic though you can actually turn these around and use them for "eye candy" and other effects if required.

See photo

 

Some other alternatives to consider for your other fixtures are:

 

RA 2000 Profile

StudioCOB FC

Eclipse Fresnel

Eclipse FC

 

You should also be aware of some of the latest LED engines that are making their way into some of the new Prolights products. They use a super bright warm white LED combined with traditional RGB. Providing great colors and amazing whites.

PixieZoom XB

Pixiewash XB

Eclipse PAR

 

A.C. Entertainment Technologies would also be more than happy to demo the kit in your venue. If you are interested give them a call.

 

EDIT: In the interest of transparency, I do work for A.C.

[alistermorton]

One of the things we'd be looking for is the ability to match the LEDs to a gelled tungsten lamp. Great colours can mean different things for different productions. Any opinion on how easily the above mentioned fixtures can be tuned to match a gel?

[timsabre]

The Martin and Elation ones have a set of gel colours pre-programmed which can be selected using a macro channel. But there's not many and they tend to be the saturated colours - for other gel colours you'd have to mix it yourself. If you have a good knowledge of colour theory it should not be too hard to get a close match. And most professional consoles have a gel picker feature which will get you somewhere near.

 

I am dubious though about whether it is possible to exactly match an LED fixture to a gelled tungsten lamp. You can make it look identical on a white surface, but if you change to a coloured surface it will not look the same because of the peaks and troughs in the output of the different LED colours. Those "LED" gels that Lee used to do have a similar problem, they look right on white objects but not on other colours.

 

[alistermorton]

That's what I was thinking, Tim. A basic RGB fixture can be made to look very close (though most likely not identical) to tungsten on a piece of neural grey/white card with enough work, but the holes in the spectrum show up as soon as real life intrudes. I know the newer fixtures have more emietters to fill in the gaps, I was wondering how well in real life they work.

 

Our Ion of course has a gel picker for Lee, Rosco etc but ETC only offer anything remotely approaching a promise of matching if it's a fixture they've had through the factory and calibrated the desk against, and their own fixtures are going to be the closest match. Otherwise it's a best guess. We've seen this with cheap eye candy pars and low end RGBW fresnels - some colours look ok, others are nowhere near.

[timsabre]

The fixtures with more emitter colours are better, but still look different on some colours. Patterned or painted cloths are the worst because different bits show up. Some colours really "pop" under LED light that are not noticeable with tungsten.

Manually mixing a colour from 6 or 7 emitter colours is pretty much impossible. If the console has a colour picker which intelligently uses all the outputs then that can be quite good. The Avolites one mostly works quite well in Titan V11 and seems to be able to use all colours, though they must have put in some guesses for the actual colours of the emitters. Chamsys only uses the RGB last time I looked but that was a while back, they might have fixed it. I am not sure what other manufacturers are doing.

 

[alistermorton]

From what I recall from a recent conversation, if ETC have calibrated against the fixture (which you can tell by looking at the colour space, it will show a dotted line showing the limit of the colour gamut) then if the fixture is patched in the right mode the colour picker will use all the emitters, otherwise it is almost certainly going to just use RGBW (and maybe A) if it's there, any other colours are down to you. But I may have got some of that wrong.