Well I have barely scratched the surface of the show floor but I have three things that I want to report on:
1) That
Apollo Blacklight is AMAZING! I stood about 2 feet from it wearing my black shirt. There was absolutely No, None, ZERO, purple light on my shirt. My shirt remained black except for the brightly glowing lint. I've never seen a
blacklight which is TRULY black before. The bigger one is pointed upward at the booth
logo about 15 feet away and making clearly glow with lots of ambient light around. It's VERY punchy and very impressive.
2) Meanwhile at the Chauvet booth, the new Ovation lights are equally cool. First off it's a great white
ellipsoidal fixture. Bright, white light that looks like it would be a perfect match for a
Source Four. They have a light
cue setup running a 10 second
fade of 100% to 0% and back on two channels.
Channel 1 is a
shoebox dimmer,
channel 300 is a
DMX line. Then they hot swap the cables from being
dimmer powered to
DMX/powercon powered. It takes about 5 seconds for the light to recognize that its' now on
DMX, make whatever adjustments it needs, and jump right in to following the
cue again. They say the street price will be around $1400. It's the kind of
fixture every theater should have 4 of for those times when you run out of dimmers and need a couple more lights in an area. Or if you are on a college campus and you have multiple theaters with multiple levels of tech in them, this would be a fantastic way to jump back and forth.
3) The Super
Sharpie... now with even more Sharpie-ness! I was talking with
@GreyWyvern about it. His observation was that it looks like it has a "negative
beam angle". It's as if the shaft of light comes out of the
fixture, straight, focuses to a near perfect
point, then bends back out to the same size perfectly straight shaft of light, a perfect hour glass. Sort of like this: ==>--<==
While I'm pretty sure physics says that's impossible, that's what it looks like and I am concerned that Clay Packy may have hired wizards to produce this thing.