bigclive Posted December 5, 2015 Share Posted December 5, 2015 Just in case you guys have seen the little moving head disco lights on ebay, I thought I'd post a link to a video I made of the insides of one. It turns out you get quite a lot for your £80. Robust chassis with fast pan and tilt, two independent wheels for gobo and colour (using "diachronic" glass apparently), a low power 10W LED that limits the light's use to small clubs, education or home and a modestly robust control system. I was surprised at the quality of construction for a generic Chinese product. It strikes me that this would be a useful educational tool, toy or bit of visual eye-candy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3dHP6ehGY0 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ojc123 Posted December 5, 2015 Share Posted December 5, 2015 Interesting. Thanks for that. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dbuckley Posted December 5, 2015 Share Posted December 5, 2015 Caught the link via Reddit, and enjoyed the movie. Surprised it a white light LED source with dianacronic filters, rather than a RGB LED. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
timsabre Posted December 5, 2015 Share Posted December 5, 2015 Surprised it a white light LED source with dianacronic filters, rather than a RGB LED. Combining the RGB evenly so you don't get coloured fringes through a gobo is optically very hard. Much easier to have white LED with filters. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
paulears Posted December 6, 2015 Share Posted December 6, 2015 What is clear is that even in a cheap fixture, they're using sound engineering. Clive's not afraid of calling things as they are and his undertone was that he was quietly satisfied. Nothing seemed budged or low quality, and simply steps taken to protect the mechanics from damage, like the microswitch on pan. Nothing 'horrible' there, so the one thing missing from smaller low budget shows is perhaps now within reach. You could have a pile of these for the price of just one bigger fixture. I'm kind of thinking about the look a row of these would create? A dozen all doing a gobo wash, or identical beam waving? I suspect the old 'Chinese is rubbish' assumptions are now well out of date? I had a look at my usual supplier and they have them for around £70 if you buy 10, and even if Mr VAT slaps on 20%, that's cheap enough to give some thought to? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PaulDF Posted December 6, 2015 Share Posted December 6, 2015 I think it is just a gamble with the Chinese stuff, some of it is good and some of it is tat. UK mains leads that come out of are quite often not up to spec, some cheap moving heads we got came with unfused adaptors. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
paulears Posted December 6, 2015 Share Posted December 6, 2015 With equipment now Paul, I have to disagree. The PCB in Clive's video clearly want not designed just for this product. Somebody designs a functional board that can be programmed to do much more than it has to in this case, and that brings economies of scale. Taking modules off the shelf to do gobo and colour - and in that design, it would be simple to do a version with a prism module. The mains leads and adaptors are cheap as chips items bundled in after the product is assembled. I buy radio products from three suppliers, depending on stock, and the products are all 100%, but one of the three uses these horrible adaptors, two don't. Price wise - less than $2 difference. I've spent over twenty grand in the past 14 months, and NONE of it was tat - apart from as you say, a few iffy cables, which on testing I replace with CPC ones, that look very, very similar in the mouldings and markings? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
the kid Posted December 6, 2015 Share Posted December 6, 2015 I wonder what the run/lifetime is like on them. We have just swapped out our LED panels for what we call V2. The V1 were great. Worked fine no issues, but in transit they just were BAD, it turned out that V1 had poor chip mounts or some thing, so we were getting anything from 20-60% of panels with pixel errors. We would ship to be fixed and they came back, we shipped off to a new job and arrived on site with pixel errors. Great panels but very much an install only item. Would these units would stand up to being used in anything other than a fixed environment? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ojc123 Posted December 6, 2015 Share Posted December 6, 2015 Can't say about touring but we have two very similar fixtures which the students delight in programming to do fast and furious gymnastics almost every day. They're nearly two years old (the fixtures, not the kids)and still working well. I bought them as a toy really to let the students get used to the concept of moving lights but they have proved versatile and long lasting. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
musht Posted December 7, 2015 Share Posted December 7, 2015 Surely biggest question is how much higher power an LED will fit the optics ? :-) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bigclive Posted December 7, 2015 Author Share Posted December 7, 2015 Surely biggest question is how much higher power an LED will fit the optics ? :-) The limiting factors there are the power supply space in the base and the existing (passive) cooling. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
alistermorton Posted December 7, 2015 Share Posted December 7, 2015 A quick google on Lixada moving LED brings up similar looking ones with larger LEDs - 25W seems popular. EDIT Scrub that - they're 10W LED for 25W total - as per the unit Clive had. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ianl Posted December 7, 2015 Share Posted December 7, 2015 where are you seeing these at £70/£80 ? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
themadhippy Posted December 7, 2015 Share Posted December 7, 2015 The limiting factors there are the power supply space in the base and the existing (passive) cooling. you could always go down the ole varilight route with an external supply that would run 4 heads with a more powerful led Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
alistermorton Posted December 7, 2015 Share Posted December 7, 2015 where are you seeing these at £70/£80 ? eBay sellers. Or go to Ali-... and buy in (small) bulk. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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