Good LED PAR for pipe ends

[tomtech]

Does anyone know of any good LED PAR's that is designed to replace the PAR 64 with a CP62 lamp?

[Ynot]

Few LED PARs will compete well with a good old fashioned P64, although that argument doesn't actually holed up against a '64 with saturated colours in front. There is a trade-off there, certainly.

Everyone here will probably have their own experiences with different makes/models of LED gear, and the market is getting pretty full with a wide variety of choices. Your best bet would be to listen to what those are, but then 'audition' a few of the most popular ones for yourself to see what suits YOUR needs compared to what others might have. 🙂

[Don Allen]

When you consider the cost of a PAR64, the fact that it evolved as a rock and roll light for highly saturated colours and the cost of any "equivilant" fixture, I do not consider that there is an LED replacement for the PAR64 at a reasonable price.

There is a lot of "LED PAR CANS" that have a reasonable output but you need to buy IP65 rated ones to avoid fan noise and they have lots of lens so have different beam characteristics. And the LED PAR CANS do not heat up an outdoor stage floor to keep the moisture off it !

[Bryson]

I was recently quite impressed with VL800 EVENTPAR fixtures.  They seemed the closest I've seen to the equivalent of a "real" par, particularly the warm white version.  I'm using them on a project to directly replace open white Par64s used as an orchestra wash.  No lenses to lose either, you just push the lens back and forth inside the snoot.  Not super cheap, but as expensive as the VL name might suggest.

 

 

[Tomo]

A huge part of this is "What do you want them to do?"

"Open Tungsten White" or colour mixing?

If you're after deep colours, then there's quite a few good options.

If you're after the classic warm glow, there aren't many - avoid RGB like the plague, the LED Red+Green "yellow" is just plain awful.
RGBW is also often poor at faking 'tungsten' because the W is usually very high colour temp (as that increases nominal brightness), so you have to bring in lots of RG to warm it up and it's pretty yucky.

If you're after the lens glow, then there's quite a few single-colour Warm White (but they won't gel like you expect), but very few colour-mixing ones that have a similar external look. Almost all have multiple lenses, which is fine if you can't see up the nose but less so when it's in view.

[Paul Richard]

I've used ETC Colorsource pars with an oblong lens in them, they've very effective.  I particularly like the deep blue variant.I've used ETC Colorsource pars with an oblong lens in them, they've very effective.  I particularly like the deep blue variant.

[gareth]

On 4/15/2022 at 5:28 PM, Paul Richard said:

I've used ETC Colorsource pars with an oblong lens in them, they've very effective.

Colorsource PARs are pretty good without a diffuser/lens in front of them. However, my experience is that as soon as you drop one of the stock diffusers in front of the beam the flare and lack of any sort of definition to the beam is a real killer.