ETC Enters LED market with purchase of Selador

[SteveB]

ETC announced their purchase of Selador, a move that thrusts ETC boldly into the LED lighting market. ETC purchased Selador's product line, including the Lustr, Paletta, and the newly announced VIVID, which combine the 7x Color System with K2 emitters from Luxeon for an incredibly bright output.

Selador is known for their innovative LED products, most notably for using seven LED colors (7x Color System) to give incredibly smooth transitions from color to color and excellent saturation.

The ETC/Selador agreement means that ETC with now own, manufacture, and distribute the Selador product line and will retain Selador co-founders Rob Gerlach and Novella Smith as exclusive consultants to develop more products for the line.

UPDATE: Rob Gerlach has posted on ETC's Blog an incredible article on some of the finer points of the Selador 7 Color System and gives on additional insight into why the ETC/Selador deal is such a great pairing.

[icewolf08]

here is the official press release:

ETC enters LED lighting market! 441MN


After long speculation about whether ETC would enter the LED market, we are announcing our acquisition of the Selador™ LED product line from Selador co-founders Rob Gerlach and Novella Smith.

Read the full Selador launch story on our redesigned Web site home page.

In ETC CEO Fred Foster’s words, “We didn’t want to make a ‘me too’ RGB or RGBA product that didn’t provide the kind of significant innovation in lighting we strive for. With its exclusive x7 Color System™, the Selador product line produces a far superior quality of color and light to anything that we had seen before in LEDs. We also benefit from the brainpower of Selador’s Novella and Rob – great people who will join our ETC team.”

Selador’s x7 Color System seven-hue technology produces a light and color quality that conventional LED systems cannot duplicate. This unique color system produces bright broad spectrum whites and intense colors equally well, rendering pigments and skin tones in a more natural way. Read Rob Gerlach’s explanation of the x7 Color System difference on our Light Minds blog.

The Selador x7 Color System also finds its perfect counterpart in our ETC control-system offerings, which make control of LED fixtures easier, more direct and user friendly. We have already integrated color matching and HSI (hue, saturation and intensity) control of Selador products into the latest software releases of our Eos® and Congo® lighting control console lines. Our architectural systems will follow shortly, and we will continue to innovate in the areas of color management in these products.

Selador’s LED line-up includes the Paletta™ and Lustr™ products, just introduced at LDI 2008. Paletta fixtures’ unique blend of seven colors of LEDs was selected to provide the depth of color that designers are used to from their favorite saturated gels. The Lustr line uses a different blend of colors optimized for producing broad spectrum whites and tinted colors – solving the traditional LED problem of making people look unnatural.

ETC is also debuting the latest Selador product: the high-output color-mixing Vivid™ LED fixture series. The Vivid series combines the Selador x7 Color System with powerful K2 emitters from Luxeon™, for the highest output available. Vivid LED fixtures provide high brightness and intense colored lighting for much longer throws, while matching and blending with gel colors and tungsten fixtures.

Get the full product specs and details on our new Selador Series product pages.

You’ll also have a chance to see and demo our new Selador products in person at USITT and NAB!

[Pie4Weebl]

so its only a matter of time for an LED S4 par isn't it? oooh the possibilities!

[gafftapegreenia]

I'm excited.

[Kelite]

Congrats to you Steve Terry, and the rest of the ETC crew!

All our best wishes for a long and happy relationship with the Selador staff and product line (with more to come I'm sure).

[Les]

gafftaper's LED Source Four lamp cap may be closer than we think!

[soundlight]

It's not gonna be LED, it's gonna be Plasma/LIFI technology. That's the next white light source revolution.

[MSLD]

would the LED strips possibly be a good replacement for traditional cyc lights? if they havent already.

[jmabray]

From Rob's Blog post at Light Minds Think Alike:

There are other components of Selador fixtures that are critical for them to look natural to the eye and seamless next to conventional fixtures in a rig. Selador fixtures have newly redesigned circuitry within them that allows for exceptionally smooth, analog-looking dimming. I have to say that this was surprisingly difficult to achieve with a light source as responsive and non-analog as an LED, but I am extremely pleased with the results. Selador is also known for terrific beam-shaping capabilities. No, we don’t yet have a Selador ellipsoidal (it will come) but the fixtures we do have can be shaped very nicely with specialized secondary lenses. We get a lot of compliments about this.

The emphasis was added....

Things just got more interesting didn't they....

[ScottT]

Happy, happy, happy day!