DHA Digital Beamlight

[martinw]

With Clay Paky bringing back moving beamlights, I was wondering what happened to the DHA Digital Beamlight, which they built during the mid nineties for the west end musical "Martin Guerre". I remember seeing them on Jesus Christ Superstar at the Lyceum, but the house crew were being rather rude about them.

 

Are there any fixtures still around? Is anyone using them or are they all hidden somewhere at the back of some hire company warehouse?

 

Just curious really

 

Martin

[Rob Halliday]

Hi Martin,

 

The Digital Beamlight, though long out of production, is still around. Probably not the Martin Guerre/Superstar ones, though - they were the Mark 1 version, with a trunion on only one side of the lamp yoke and the very clever built in PSU-come-dimmer that turned out to be less than reliable.

 

After getting those two shows on, DHA did a ground-up re-design, keeping the optics (mirror and spill rings) and the scroll (which had the motor within the spindle) but re-designing the rest of it - a true double yoke, and a separate transformer box - you now had to give the light a non-dim feed and a separate dimmer feed. The result was a less advanced but ultimately much more reliable unit. They went onto a number of shows and still crop up every now and again - I believe there are two on 'Les Mis' in London, for example.

 

They've tended to be pretty good once installed, a bit less good for touring shows where they get rigged/de-rigged a lot. The quality of light they give was and is fabulous, with the ability to tweak the beam size (you have remote control of the lamp position within the reflector) very useful. The DBL2 was also very advanced for its ability to manipulate the light's 'zero' position and range of travel remotely from the lighting console - so if one ended up being rigged slighty 'off' you could usually compensate from this by one adjustment at the console rather than by having to manually fix lots and lots of preset focuses. The control channel's ability to let you only re-calibrate particular parameters rather than the whole light was also a first then, I think, though it's becoming more common now.

 

Once they went out of production I think all of the remaining stock ended up with White Light in London.

 

The Clay Paky light does sound interesting, though it actually sounds more like a descendent of the 'Whishpa' light that White Light made to Paule Constable's request for 'Evita' in London; she wanted a moving Aero, so White Light put an Aero lamp into the body of an Amptown Washlight then mounted a Chroma-Q scroller onto the front. That's also quite a fun little light, a great roving 'half body' shot from a side position as well as a good moving backlight beam through haze.

 

I wonder if the AlphaBeam has a 'bat sign' in its gobo wheel.....?

 

Rob.

[tokm]

With Clay Paky bringing back moving beamlights

Well.... I'd say if anything it was HE who were the first to recently bring out a beamlight, seeing as the SHOWGUN does much the same as the CP beamlight fixtures.

 

Be interesting to see how the 1500w fixtures compare to the SHOWGUNS, mainly in terms of brightness. Haven't seen any specs for it yet, so no numbers for us to judge. But all the comments about the alpha beam 300 being stupidly bright are true. Got to see 4 of them at a product demo a while back and they're incredibly punchy whatever other their going through. Reminds me of the Vari*brite feature in the VL3500s..

[stagey]

Hello,

 

Bit of a bump here, but does anyone know if there's a profile for this unit on the EOS desks (there isn't a 'DHA' section under 'Type'), or alternatively have a copy of the attributes list for this?

 

Thanks

[Tomo]

DHA is now Rosco, as they merged quite a long time ago.

That's where the (DHA) Digital Light Curtains and Pitching Light Curtains may be found.

 

Unfortunately today's Eos fixture library doesn't have the DHA (Rosco) Digital Beamlight as nobody's asked for it yet - not surprising as they were discontinued more than a decade ago.

 

I didn't think there were any of those still around.

I think you'll be looking for somebody with a paper copy of the manual - White Light certainly used to hire them, so I'd suggest giving them a call.

[niclights]

Not sure if this helps?

 

If you have access to a unit it might be easiest to just patch a bunch of dimmers to work out the channels.

[stagey]

thanks, since posting it occurred to me to take a look at the 'White Light' Strand Fixture Library...

We'll be using some on an upcoming show and I hoping for a manual too, just want to get a start on making up a show file for our desk...

 

Tomo: I had checked the Rosco section, but yeah, was hoping it might be there under some other grouping of types...