Worst lantern?

[woody74]

Altman 360 non-axial Ellipsoidal

 

-w

[Don Allen]

The Patt 45. If it is all you have got you have to use them in amateur theatre and schools but so inneficient. The Patt 803 or was it the 833 came a close second but it had a larger lens so more light escaped.

[dbuckley]

AC1000 floodlights, not sure who they are made by.

 

Oi! I really like the AC1000s, made (I believe) by ADB. Its a few years since I've picked up or returned said things to Filmer Road, but I cant recall anything untoward happening with them, and they are so much better than the 500W Strand asymetric flood.

 

As for the worst lamp, the '45 is not a great fixture, the school I attended had eight of the blighters. But, we've got some things much older and horribler down at the club garage, I'd swap em for 45's tomorrow. Well, I assume they're horribler, I've never actually plugged one in, and dont intend to either, a blind man wouldn't let them pass visual inspection. They look to have all the optical properties of a vacuum cleaner.

 

But then again, this is all a bit childish picking on fixtures older than most blue roomers, instruments do improve over time.

[andy_s]

But then again, this is all a bit childish picking on fixtures older than most blue roomers, instruments do improve over time.

 

yep - the patt 45 was developed not long after electricity was discovered.

 

My least favourite is probably a T64 - heavy, optically not brilliant, fiddly to adjust, and no discernable improvement on the unit it replaced - in fact a backwards step in some people's view.

[themadhippy]

either pat 814,no way of attaching barn doors,shutters or any other means of beam control apart from big or small, cct minuetes,sharp edged barn doors that tend to jam,colour frames that bend when you look at them,the abilaty to burn through dark colours quicker than you can cut a new piece of gel and a lamp movment system with built in speed bump,o and mustn't forget those lovley thomas 650w profiles that spilled light from every oriffice and a condensor lens that didnt like getting hot

[pete LD]

Thomas floods! well made but the gel frame is ####. every theatre I've been in which has then the local crew hate them!

they should stick to parcans!

[johnhuson]

Maybe if hire companies stopped ripping people off on the hire of them I might not mind them as much.

 

I'm curious about your comment on this Renny, every hire company I know of (including ourselves) charges the same amount for a Source 4 profile as they would for any other equivalent profile be it Selecon, Strand, CCT etc. I've certainly never seen any special higher costs for Source 4's as your post implies. The average weekly hire cost for a Source 4 profile is £12-14 which is the same as any other profile.

 

[so to justify my statement the worst thing to happen in terms of lanterns due to designers complete belief that you must have them to design.

 

I can agree with this to a certain extent, a Source 4 doesn't really do anything that any other profile does in reality, granted light output and optics on a S4 are better than others (hence why they're so ubiquitous) but any good designer should be able to work with what they've got even if it isn't what they would like!

[David A]

Fresnels - the microspots by Lancelin got so hot but at least they used silicon cable unlike the dreadfull minim which carboned the pvc, the preludes with their self destructing lamp tray and idiotic input plugs and more recently Kupo have made some truly woefull units.Profiles- the undisputed worst unit the selecon original axial which you can be truly gratefull never made it to UK ,it used a mes globe made by 'eye' which didn't last very long and had a low colour temp and not to miss out the Altmans with their FEP lamps which would bulge inside the reflector and have to be smashed out.

[StevieR]

Tea Pots.

 

'orrible, big and dang heavy b*gg*rs! And the light output and focus.......????

[Neil Hampson]

I must agree on the Strand Patt.833 as one of the worst lanterns ever to be built.

My venue has a fleet of 16 and as a small venue this represents over half of my fresnel stock. basically the design idea semed to be: Take a reasonable lantern (pat 803) rip of some of the useful stuff i.e. (the reflector) and sell them a bit cheaper to school buyers who know no better! The barn door attachment method was also very suspect, clipping into the inner edge of the lens cut-out.

I could never imagine, even in 1982 (when we bought ours) why there was no reflector, it must have saved all of 10p not to fit one into the lantern as most of the hardware was already fitted to the lamptray... I remember spending most of the summer one year fitting scrap Patt.123 reflectors into ours to try and increase the light output, and even then a dirty Patt.123 gave a better light output than the modified 833

[tanko]

Theatre spot, apparently its supposed to be a fresnel. light out put its non-existant.

[patesgeoffrey]

I'm going to have to agree with johnhuson. In my short 'life' as a lighting technician, these have been by far the most annoying. WE have 5 at school, and no two fo them seem to work in the same way! (or at all, actually) They all project a nice image of the lamp filament onto the ground to matter what the throw or focus.

 

I'm not experienced enough to be able to identify any mechanical faults on them as I haven't found one that seems to be working yet! I'm sure with some TLC they could be better, but until then the best use I've found is long term lamp storage.

[Paul Roberts]

Patt 45 for me. My school has two; ones in bits, the others not used cos it's crap.

[Renny]

Maybe if hire companies stopped ripping people off on the hire of them I might not mind them as much.

 

I'm curious about your comment on this Renny, every hire company I know of (including ourselves) charges the same amount for a Source 4 profile as they would for any other equivalent profile be it Selecon, Strand, CCT etc. I've certainly never seen any special higher costs for Source 4's as your post implies. The average weekly hire cost for a Source 4 profile is £12-14 which is the same as any other profile.

 

 

My local hire company that I always use charged me about £6 per week for Cantatas, then when they moved their hire stock over to SL and S4 the price leapt up to £12 per week. Fair enough as they had to invest in a lot of new stock but if I remember rightly Cantatas when new (a long time ago) they were actually more expensive than SL's are to buy now. I think now that lighting design is more profile based than in days gone by in studio spaces the hire companies have us over a barrel.

[Nick S]

Altman 360 non-axial Ellipsoidal

 

-w

 

See, he's got a point - we can knock the Patt 45, but the Altman is surely worse purely because it's rare I ever see a theatre relying solely on Patt 45s, whereas I see plenty of theatres in the states using solely Altman 360s.