RGB Moving Head Gobo Spot

[HarryTHP]

Might be a potentially ridiculous question, but I'm looking for a moving head spot with a gobo wheel that uses RGB LED lights, not a white LED with a colour wheel.

Does such a fixture exist? I can't seem to find anything that fits this description other than one which is being sold for £20k 😳

https://sgmlight.com/products/g·spot-turbo

If anyone knows of anymore, I'd be thankful to hear of them as it seems somewhat baffling that such a fixture doesn't seem to exist...

Thanks! 🙂

[J Pearce]

Basically - an RGB(W) source of any useful power is physically large, as it necessarily has multiple LEDs. To achieve good gobo projection you want a 'point source' - ideally the tiniest source you can imagine, though obviously real life constraints limit that. There are ways around that, such as collimating lenses used in some of the Source4 style LED profiles, but these are rather bulky and heavy for a moving head spot.

This is why the cheap(er) moving head LED profiles use a white LED (which is actually a UV led coated in a warm or cold white phosphor), which can be bright and small for good optical performance, then use a colour wheel or colour mixing flags to achieve the colour.

[Bryson]

Elation Fuze is a RGBMA array - comes in spot or profile versions, both with gobo wheels.  About 3000UKP each, I believe.  https://www.elationlighting.com/series/fuze  I like the Fuze fixtures a lot and you’ll find them on most of my recent jobs that need a cost-effective mover for a modestly sized house.

 

ETC Releve are also RGBL:  https://www.etcconnect.com/ReleveSpot/  I don’t actually love the Releves but they might suit your purposes.  Plus ETC support is not to be sniffed at.

 

Robe T1/T2 are also RGB+? based, but are comparably priced to a Honda Civic so maybe not a good fit here.  https://www.robe.cz/t1-profile
They are very nice, though.  I just specified some for a big theatre over here and they work great.  

 

[HarryTHP]

20 hours ago, J Pearce said:

Basically - an RGB(W) source of any useful power is physically large, as it necessarily has multiple LEDs. To achieve good gobo projection you want a 'point source'

Ah yes of course! I didn't consider this. That must be why they're seemingly scarcer than I imagined

 

16 hours ago, Bryson said:

Elation Fuze is a RGBMA array - comes in spot or profile versions, both with gobo wheels.  About 3000UKP each, I believe.  https://www.elationlighting.com/series/fuze  I like the Fuze fixtures a lot and you’ll find them on most of my recent jobs that need a cost-effective mover for a modestly sized house.

The Fuzes look really nice! I think the Robe T1's are certainly off the table given the price. A fair few of Robe's fixtures have chinese copies made of them, but not a case with this one so no money saving option there...

 

I suppose my next question is, how much control would a fixture that advertises CMY colour mixing give me? There's a lot more to choose from especially at an affordable price point. Is CMY mixing almost as flexible as RGB or is it not much better than the generic colours you'd expect from a colour wheel?

[HarryTHP]

I've been scouring the internet for hours throughout today and have probably looked at over a hundred different fixtures, but I've just not been satisfied with the colour wheel offerings at the price point I want and didn't really want to be tempted by chinese imports based on more expensive moving head gobo spots as my experience with them has not been great. I hired some Robe Pointe copies a while back and they were incredibly noisy and the light they produced was pretty visually unappealing compared to what I've seen of the real thing (probably where my dislike of leds with colour wheels comes from!)

Just as I was about to give up, I made one more seach for 'rgb gobo light' and this appeared on the first page.
A made-in-china listing for the 'Ablelite ADA50BRGB.'

$580 (approx £480) for an RGB mover with a gobo wheel?? Surely it seems too good to be true. I found the manufacturer's page for it and looking at the video and the datasheets it's seemingly exactly what I want. It's suprisingly well documented for a chinese fixture and they even provide patch profiles for it. I wouldn't expect it to be as good as the Elation Fuze looks, but at £480 a pop, I'm rather tempted just to see what it's like. There's absolutely no other mention of it anywhere though apart from one more retail site it's listed on which is where I shall probably purchase it from seeing that the made-in-china listing has a minimum purchase qty of 12 😩

Am I missing something here? Given both the scarcity and price point of RGB moving head gobo spots, and complete absense of any other chinese version, this can't be for real...

[musht]

Am I missing something here?

• Beam angle:2°......

[Don Allen]

It is very hard trying to find a budget RGBW LED Moving Head Profile. I bought two Colorfullight Butterfly 150W RGBW LED  in 2014 as I did not want colour wheels. These are still working, noisy fans but they are thermally controlled so not a problem with music shows. As with any Chinese origin lighting, in this case Hong Kong lighting, the manuals and web page descriptions are inaccurate and conflicting. One of them was damaged in transit, I had to strip it down and rebuild it after straightening the yoke which took a lot of work but was worth it. Beam width is 14 degrees, they keep it narrow to get a bright output. No Iris but I wanted to keep the weight down so did not want too many stepper motors. Having rotating and fixed glass gobos is a bonus. Colorfullight have not had them available for many years now.

I did buy an RGBW moving head profile from MSLighting MHLED200 but it had pan problems, it randomly jumped a few degrees. was not able to resolve the problem so sold it but maybe should have persevered more with the fault.

The manual of 150W Led Moving head spot.pdf

[HarryTHP]

18 hours ago, musht said:

Am I missing something here?

• Beam angle:2°......

I thought that was a typo and that they must mean 20°, but apparantly not so:
https://jnrorwxhllkklm5p-static.micyjz.com/cloud/lpBpoKrploSRkjikopriio/LUX-data.png
At a 10m distance, they're just shy of a diameter of 1m.
 

17 hours ago, Don Allen said:

As with any Chinese origin lighting, in this case Hong Kong lighting, the manuals and web page descriptions are inaccurate and conflicting.

Yeah it's a bit of a headache, and if you buy the same fixture at different times, you sometimes end up with completely different lights!
 

17 hours ago, Don Allen said:

I did buy an RGBW moving head profile from MSLighting MHLED200 but it had pan problems, it randomly jumped a few degrees. was not able to resolve the problem so sold it but maybe should have persevered more with the fault.

Other than your issues with panning, which I'm assuming was a problem with that specific unit, how did you find it? I'm worried the 50W one I found might be a bit measly. Ultimate question is were the fans noisy? 😅 Do you know what the rotary dial next to the LCD is for? And upon further research I can see it includes... A colour wheel!! An RGB light with a colour wheel as well; how strange

Edited March 16, 2023 by HarryTHP

[Bryson]

On 3/15/2023 at 4:13 PM, HarryTHP said:

I think the Robe T1's are certainly off the table given the price. A fair few of Robe's fixtures have chinese copies made of them, but not a case with this one so no money saving option there...

 

The light engine in the T-series fixtures is a bit more complex than just regular RGB.  they have an unspecified number of other emitters in there and some clever self-calibration / middleware magic that means they're a bit more capable than regular RGB - I imagine it's not easy to copy!

[HarryTHP]

On 3/16/2023 at 3:16 AM, Don Allen said:

I did buy an RGBW moving head profile from MSLighting MHLED200 but it had pan problems, it randomly jumped a few degrees. was not able to resolve the problem so sold it but maybe should have persevered more with the fault.

Fast forward 4 months and I now own two of these things. One isn't detecting a DMX signal which is fun and the other came with a weird misaligned powercon cable that doesn't fit in anything...

How did you patch these fixtures?? I've followed the exact DMX channel mappings as in the instructions, but all I'm able to control on my one working light is the pan. Do you happen to have a fixture preset for EOS desks I can pinch? I can't find anything online, but someone must have created one at some point

[Don Allen]

I used Light factory to control the MHLED200. One of the advantages of Light factory is having drop down menus for attributes such as gobos, as you can add a picture of the gobo on the menu line. I create all of my Light Factory fixture profiles as once you have done your first it is easy and quick. The picture shows one of the shows I used the profiles on, you can see the red striped gobo on the rock wall. The profile is on the roof of the shelter on the right. I have attached the user manual. Just keep asking Grace for help with the lights, they usually like a video of any fault. I always replace Chinese PowerCon cables as they usually get the active and neitral wire colours the wrong way around.

MH_LED_200D.lff MHLED 200D manual new v1_1.pdf

[HarryTHP]

On 7/9/2023 at 2:25 AM, Don Allen said:

The picture shows one of the shows I used the profiles on, you can see the red striped gobo on the rock wall. The profile is on the roof of the shelter on the right.

Wow, they look really impressive, hopefully I did a good thing buying them!

On 7/9/2023 at 2:25 AM, Don Allen said:

I have attached the user manual. Just keep asking Grace for help with the lights, they usually like a video of any fault. I always replace Chinese PowerCon cables as they usually get the active and neitral wire colours the wrong way around.

Thanks! Yeah I'm talking with Grace at the moment, next port of call is to open it up when I'm next at the theatre and check the DMX In is properly connected. If not, should be a simple soldering job. The screws seem to strip easily, so that'll be fun.. The PowerCon cable was very weird. The inner part was rotated so it just didn't fit in anything, not an issue though as I have others.

Put in a fixture request to ETC to see if they'll make me a file for my Element desk. So fingers crossed they come back with that- I'm going to try it on a 1:1 patch when I'm next in the theatre just to check everything is actually working!

Will post updates here when I've made progress!

[Stuart91]

14 minutes ago, HarryTHP said:

The PowerCon cable was very weird. The inner part was rotated so it just didn't fit in anything, not an issue though as I have others.

It wouldn't happen to be a mis-coloured connector of the wrong type? 

Kosher PowerCon connectors are blue for the supply and white for the drain. As well as the different colour, they're keyed differently to avoid misconnection. 

But meanwhile in the wonderful world of AliBaba etc. it's possible to get either type in whatever colour you fancy. 

(My personal favourite was some black and yellow coloured ones that would pass for TrueOne at a glance...)

[Don Allen]

If you don't have any success with etc creating your fixture profile, try the user forums, I found that etc are very slow on ColorSource fixture files.

[HarryTHP]

On 7/14/2023 at 7:40 AM, Don Allen said:

If you don't have any success with etc creating your fixture profile, try the user forums, I found that etc are very slow on ColorSource fixture files.

Yeah, it appears they have a massive backlog... With a bit of trial and error, I managed to patch them myself 🙂

I also got them both working! The one with the broken pan just needed it's rubber belt slipping back over the motor. Not easily accessible at all, I managed to do it through a small gap using some pens after half disasembling the light, but to get full access, the whole thing would have needed to come apart and the side panels are held on with an excessive amount of screws! 😂

The one with no DMX signal is also fixed, as I was using it as a reference to fix the broken pan light, and in doing so noticed a disconnected, slightly melted connector. Reattached it and all works well! Can't say the build quality on those PCBs is good at all... The insides of those lights are an awful mess.

One light's fan is much louder than the other. After I've used them for my show in August, I'm thinking of replacing the fans. At a glance they just look like regular computer case fans, so I'm thinking of replacing them with some more quiet Noctua fans if I can find a model that matches the size and connectivity.

Thanks for all your help! After a lot of frustration and perseverance, they're finally working well 😌