A 36 Luxeon can for $261 + S&H!?!

[soundlight]

So if you remember way back when...the PSW LED can shootout, there was a can called the Northwest can. Well, those folks at Northwest apparenly have a decent price on Luxeons, if this is any indication. 36 Luxeons seems to be standard for the middle-of-the-line LED cans (Coemar PARlite LED, Chauvet COLORado1, Elation OptiRGB and others). But the COLORado1 is about $850, and if I remember correctly, the Coemar's MSRP is above $1000. They also now have Luxeon conversion kits for your old PAR64 cans. Northwest also has my favorite, no-nonsense channeling scheme for RGB LED cans - Dimmer/Strobe, Red, Green, Blue. 4 channels. No extra stuff to drag down programming.

And here's something else to check out: a 96 Luxeon RGB strip by Northwest for below the price of the Chauvet.

No, they're not IP-66 rated, no they're not the best quality, and no, they probably won't last as long as a PARlite LED, but as long as you don't throw 'em around too much, they're probably pretty decent units!

[derekleffew]

My only concern about low,cost, no name units would be color consistency across units, now and over time. I have witnessed this issue with CK ColorBlast 12 and ColorBlaze72. Apparently, the Martin Stagebar54 does very good in this regard, but time will tell as units age and invariably are placed next to brand new fixtures if this will be an issue or not.

[soundlight]

The other thing that I would worry about is the circuitry. Sure, the LED manufacturer states 60 to 100 thousand hours, but that's under ideal conditions. There's a good chance that the voltage may not always be spot on, and the PWM technology might not be as good as Color Kinetics or Martin.

[Pie4Weebl]

so we have all seen the $109 led par here:
http://www.solarisnetwork.com/led_par.php

What's the group opinion on them, I was thinking of getting a few to have a small rig for bands playing in bars and I thought they might fit the bill.

[soundlight]

They look pretty decent, about the same build quality as the Wiedamark cans, but black. 4 of them, 2 cheapo scanners, and a controller would be a perfect mini system. By cheapo scanners I mean these. But a pair of ADJ pocket scans off of ebay would do the same thing for the same price and be better quality (the Pocket Scan is one of the few products that ADJ made that can have the **** beat out of it and still work).

[derekleffew]

I like them. Looks very similar to the one I bought from ebay for $151 delivered, except mine has an LED display instead of dipswitches, which I prefer, but no strobe or sound function, which I wouldn't use anyway. Mine is as bright as a 250wPAR38/SP. I'd plan on affixing a frost gel, pity that it has no colorframe clips. Buy four and let us know how they work for ya.

You may need my handy dipswitch chart with these. If this isn't the correct one, let me know and I'll send you the "HighEnd" version.

What console are you gonna use them with?

[Pie4Weebl]

The idea I am kicking around at the moment is 10 of those as a backline, on some cheapo board (one of those under $500 elation boards or something possibly this one and some par 38's or whatever as front light and renting the whole set up out to bands for a nominal fee. Soundlight that mover looks amusing, I only wonder how it only uses three channels?

EDIT: It seems color, gobo, intensity and strobe are all on one chan....

[kovacika]

A friend of mine bought 10. They have reasonably even fields, with half decent brightness. I covered an eight by eight stage with ten throwing from 20'. Definitely not the brightest things ever, but rich colors. the only color i was even halfway disappointed with was the red, but i also think asking the lights to do a 20' throw was a bit much. Best feature is the low power draw. just in sheer volume you can beat traditional pars, especially on a power to light ratio.

[derekleffew]

Coming soon to a St. Louis dive bar, Pie4Weebl Stage Lighting! In 5 years you'll have enough to buy out PRG, and take over the world, Pinky.

[len]

At some point you have to consider how little those fixtures are in terms of disposability. Buy a fixture for $200. Use it on 20 shows. You should have made your money back and then some. After that, if it fails, throw it away and get some more. The fixtures I use primarily for uplights were paid for in less than 3 months. As a business person, Return On Investment is something you always calculate. Most times you estimate it in advance of a purchase, because you can never be sure how often a fixture will go out.

The down side to these cheap/inexpensive products is that the company and/or product may not be around when you need to buy more of them.