LED Floodlight

[Thomas]

I read about this fixture on this site a good few months ago and had to go check it out for myself. What you see in the image is a sneakily-taken photo of one of the LED floods in the final room of the tour of the CNN Centre in Atlanta, GA.

What I'd like to know is
a.) who makes it?
b.) how much does it cost?
c.) where can I get it from?
d.) is it any good for theatre purposes?

Thanks!

[nez]

yea me to it looks neat

[soundman]

might be these http://www.colorkinetics.com/ls/rgb/colorblast12/ if not those specific one I would out money on the fact it is made by CK. As far as price they are going for just under 500 a piece, http://www.solarisnetwork.com/item_1745 Ive seen them used on two shows that I worked on. One was a club tour with a rock band and they were set in truss that was horizontal and wraped in cyc fabric. Created some pretty cool looks. The other was a national areana tour where there was a few road cases of them and they were in the truss as warmers and on the stage floor to light up the musicains. I dont know if there throw is good enough for cyc lighting but for close up apps they might work.

[Inaki2]

Yes that is indeed a Colorblast 12. Amazing lights, we use them all the time, and I think we own over 300 of them because the demand is so big on them.

As for their use in theater, it depends, RGB mixing is good up to a certain point, it can cause multiple colored shadows and may be prone to flickering in low levels. Its also very hard to get nice pastel colors out of them unless they have an Amber LED in them. Personally, I like them.

[soundlight]

In college, I'm going to take some electrical engineering classes, and plan to construct a prototype of a DMX-controlled, 5-channel fixture that has Red, Green, Blue, and Amber LED's, as well as a dimmer channel for the whole thing. Probably quite a few more LED's than the colorblast 12, but I'll start out small. I'm thinking that a PAR-46 fixture might be a good size, with as many LED's as I can fit in it. Considering the price of LED's, it could be a pretty expensive fixture, but worth it.

Amber is almost essential to a good color mix. If only my cyc lights were 4-circuited...dream on...

[Inaki2]

The whole thing with LED units is not their creatin but the LEDs itself, there is a big part of the R&D that goes into finding or producing the LEDs and matching them. Otherwise, LEDs can be very dissimilar in color one to another, even from one company and model.

Good luck on your project, should be fun to do!!!

[ship]

Color Blasts will in a few years hit the resale market and be readily available to all. They were a big step up over what even five years ago was some attempts at stage lighting washes which were more like cyc lights that had 150w RSC lamps in them as opposed to similar ones in use using 1Kw lamps. Could do for the theater in low light levels but not for rock and roll. At the moment, Color Blasts retail at about $400 to $600.00 each new. A few tours have the novelty of being lit only by them and other LED’s and other similar types at the moment supplement by way of them, but these days it’s more effect than primary light source as a norm still. Sure there is LED audience blinders, even took a call this week from someone with a LED light curtain wall wising for a transformer to convert for a Euro tour. There is Mac 300's modified to be LED that just went on a major tour, even prop fixtures for another tour lit by stuff like the Colemar LED PAR 56 in the housing of a 10Kw Fresnel for effect. Otherwise Colorblasts mounted inside 4x4 light boxes or entire truss based cages lit by LED strip lights out on tour.. LED is the new thing. Believe there is a LED Leko if not on the market, about to come to market.

Still in choosing a LED it’s a question of output and what is not as much advertised CRI (Color Rendering Index.) A Color blast might have in use a new use for it by way of mounted on truss ladders and suspended down from a truss on 18" centers, but it’s CRI even if intensity is good, the CRI takes one back to the early days of arc source intelligent lighting since it’s not very good at reproducing by way of reflection all colors on stage and will be somewhat difficult to reproduce all colors of light with. In not checking, it’s CRI is probably in the 70's instead of 90's as most moving lights or 100 as per a filament source of light.

As for the Color Blast itself, it’s an architectural fixture that is used for rock and roll. The little set screws that mount it’s yoke to fixture fall out, it has no means of safety cable, and the only mounting to clamp hole is a ½" NPT (7/8" dia.) hole. Not much you can do in mounting say a half cheseborough that uses a ½” bolt, to a 7/8" hole. Urr, a fender washer? A fender washer in making up for hole size has what for a shock loading rating before it cones or fails in if not allowing the fixture to fall, no longer allowing sufficient tension on holding the fixture in it’s focus. Given a fixture yoke/bracket with a 7/8" hole, only a 3/8" bolt to a half cheseborough in using a 3/8" SAE washer between the cheseborough and fender washer will prevent the clamp not tight enough to move freely but loose enough to move in focusing from moving about in that hole. You than have a fender washer to cover for the hole but use also a 3/8" USS washer to act as if leaf spring in better preventing the fender washer from coning out. (Just did some custom brackets to hang these fixtures on a 3/4"x2" display booth track thus I remember what best fit.) So for this specific fixture, countering it’s architectural connection to 1900 box ½" NPT hole in it is a hastle.

After this, it’s a enclosed in frosted soda lime safety glass fixture that the manufacturer does not service. Someone stores away this fixture in the wrong way and you get a $400.00 and much more piece of junk the manufacturer won’t touch in replacing it’s broken frosted lens. Once broken, they would rather you just buy a new fixture or might send it to me in being the only service center as it were that would scrape off the old lens and replace it with a new one. Nope, it won’t be a cheap thing to replace. Out of lots in the inventory, I normally get about 20 fixtures a year that I need to replace broken lenses on. Some of them if given a sufficient blow will never work again in a LED no longer working. Others in the lens being replaced work again as designed. Can’t say or depend upon what was sufficient to break the lens if it was also sufficient to break some link to the circuit board in making it now trash. On average, break one lens and you possibly are throwing away a very expensive lighting fixture.

The Color Blast these years are a very popular fixture. Not many using the Mac 500 or Mac 600 fixtures these days yet I also remember them as very popular. Intellibeam for a tour???? I don’t think it has too much more a life before it’s replaced by something more efficient, much less designed for stage use rather than architectural use. Even the power supplies by them... absolutely no safe way to rig them short of re-structuring them for the hang.

Fixture is designed for architectural install. Wait a while and they will be better designed by way of how it clamps and what lamps are in it. /while waiting, LED's are constantly getting better and even more cost effective. WAit for them.

[PitRatPat]

Hey y'all, regarding the Color Blast 12, can anyone tell me the color temperature of these fixtures. I can only find operational temps in the cut sheets. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
PitRat

[soundlight]

LEDs have no color temperature. Each LED produces a specific frequency of light, so you're mixing spikes frequencies of light. I'd elaborate, but I'm kinda in a hurry right now, so that's the basic idea of it.

[derekleffew]

soundlight is correct regarding the CK ColorBlast 12 TR. However, Philips/CK makes an identical form factor unit with just warm white and cool white LEDs. This allows one to set and/or mix color temperatures from 3000-6500K. Info on theiW Blast 12 TR here. I see them being used a lot in TV shoots. The "white" of all three channel LED fixtures is never pretty. The Martin Stagebar54 has a nice white, as does I'm told the seven channel Selador units.