Took delivery of an ETC Ion-First Impressions

[jufam44]

Hello All,

Approximately two weeks ago my theater took delivery of an ETC Ion console, and I thought I'd share some first impressions.

-Hardware-

The console is tiny-it's approximately a 20" square. We also have a universal fader wing-more on that later. The physical keys are hard plastic, but are fairly easy to push and make a satisfying tap when you push them down. The blackout and A/B faders are harder to manipulate than those on our old 48/96, but they're workable. My one complaint about the physical keys is that the fader covers are made out of plastic, as opposed to the rubber on the 48/96.
The encoder wheels (4) are easy to use, and are both an encoder and a button, so when you push them down they can act differently than simply rotating them. There is a primary intensity wheel that makes it very easy to adjust intensity on the fly, and the various encoder pages assign different non-intensity parameters to the encoder wheels. (It makes programming very easy!)

-Software-
I like the new operating system. Patching movers (in our case Mac 2k Performance II's) is a cinch, and it took me all of about two minutes to patch all five lights. Once they're patched and you're in the ION environment, moving them and color changing is a blast to do. It's intuitive and easy to use. The displays tab gives me a color picker for the CMY, and you simply click the color on the screen and poof, it comes out of the light. There are also pre-calibrated gel colors-If you wanted R52, you could just click on R52 and on lights with CMY the color is made. Recording cues is easy-move it where you want it, type [Record] [Cue] {x} [Enter] and you're done. The display is logical and well laid out, and the soft keys are extremely useful. If you hold down an encoder wheel, for instance, and you're in a page that controls beam effects (gobos, color wheel, animation wheel, strobe, etc.), the softkeys become three options-Home, Min, Max. (or in the case of Gobos or colors, Home, Last, Next). Pressing the key advances the gobo, or max's the strobe, etc. It makes running movers a blast. But what about conventionals? Well, the software has a neat layout that shows you whether the light is currently in a cue, fixture information (S4 750w), whether it's coming up in a cue, and just about anything else you might want to know. I really enjoyed the software, and it's super intuitive to use.
Overall, I really like the board, and I'll be using it in a show in about a week, so I can comment on it's effectiveness then.

I'll post a separate review for the extension wing.

[Nathaniel]

I got a chance to use one and was trained on it yesterday, I really like it. I especially like the Focus/Beam/Color palettes, they're quick and useful.

One downside I found is recording groups from live: if a channel has been selected and then taken out (ex: chan 5 @out or chan 5@0) it's still included in the group, any channel that has been captured since the last Go To Cue 0 command will be recorded in the group. (unless there's some way around this?)

I also like the multiple cue lists and being able to assign submasters as playbacks, looks to be useful.