soundlight
Well-Known Member
I had about a week recently to demo the Chauvet Rogue R2 spot at my main place of employment. I was so impressed that I wanted to do a little write up on it here for CB folks. I'm pretty sure that this light will be known among co-workers as the light that I wouldn't shut up about. In light of that, we're probably going to be purchasing 18-24 of them for rental stock soon.
I'm usually that guy who will show up to the fixture demo with console personality and screwdrivers in hand, ready to make your fixture show me all of its flaws, so one person at work was joking that I almost went too easy on this one, or else it really is that good.
First of all, kudos to Chauvet for making a line (the Rogue line) that's not only ridiculously affordable but very feature-rich. If you're looking for movers to add to your space, check out the Rogue line.
The main question everyone wants to know after reading the spec sheet is "how bright is it?" Well, there are several ways to answer that. For one, it blew our older Studio Spot 575s out of the water. No contest, but that's what we were expecting. After confirming that, we did a lineup with a MAC700 Profile (700W arc source, 7500K), VL3500 Spot (1200W arc source, 6000K), and the Rogue R2 spot. The lamp in the MAC700 was brand new that day, the lamp in the VL3500 Spot was about a third or so in to its life. Also to be fair, the MAC700 and VL3500 have multi-lens zoom systems on them to cut down on output, while the R2 just has a fixed-angle 16.5 degree lens.
In white, the MAC700 looked about as bright (a little bit brighter than the R2 in the center due to hot spot, and definitely noticeably dimmer than the R2 on the edges, again due to hot spot). The VL3500 Spot was noticeably brighter in the center, and about the same intensity at the edges. The R2 had what I would call an almost perfectly flat field. Let me repeat that. The R2 had what I would call an almost perfectly flat field. One of the shop techs that walked by told me it had to be fake because no moving light could have that flat of a field.
With all 3 lights up, the R2 looked cooler yet at the same time pinker than the VL3500 or the MAC700. I suspect that this is due to the high green content of the discharge lamps, because without the other fixtures up next to it it looks very white, albeit with a high color temp.
Where it gets interesting is where we start putting colors in. With the VL3500 Spot and R2 Spot both with the dark orange color chip in and both fixtures pointed at the wall, they looked almost identical. Some of the production staff and salespeople stopped by, and none of them could believe what they were looking at. The VL3500 Spot had a slight edge over the R2, but it was only in the center where the hot spot was. One of the guys said "I didn't even think we'd be looking at this with anything close to a 1200W source." After all, it's "just" a 240W LED!
The MAC700 didn't have a color chip on the wheel that matched, and as expected when I mixed to an orange that was close, it was dimmer than the R2. Subtractive color mixing with saturated colors can really take the fight out of a light. We received a similar result with dark blue, which the R2's higher color temp helped out with, I'm sure. This thing blew away every single output expectation we had for it, that's for sure. Now to be fair, this is just to the naked eye up on a wall, but then again I think that's actually a pretty good test.
It's also LED, so that means that when you bring the fader down, it's off. When you shut it down, there's no lamp-off and cool-down sequence that you hope your students/volunteers/board-ops remember after you leave them to run your rig of movers. There's no heavy ballast, and no lamps to replace.
So we've covered output. Next up, color system. We've got 2 fixed color wheels here. Both capable of split colors, which Chauvet has included as defined points on the color channels rather than having to slowly scroll through on your encoder trying to find that point where the split between the colors is in the center. There are two CTO filters that really do look great. The full CTO filter is pretty fantastic, and looks more authentic than the CTO chip on the MAC700 or the variable CTO on the VL3500. There are also some color pairs that look great as split colors.
One thing that I did not like about the colors is that there are A) two very close pairs, and B) two glaring (in my opinion) gaps. First, the pairs: there are two medium dark blues and two oranges that are ridiculously close. No need to have two colors that close on a fixture with fixed wheels. Second, the gaps: no lavender, no amber, and no good way to mix either. Unfortunately, the color chips are glued in. I will say though that having two color wheels is pretty fantastic, and they're both pretty snappy. You can combine something like the slicing green-leaning yellow on wheel 1 with the full CTO on wheel 2 to get a nice, almost "canary" yellow. Plenty of other combos exist too, including combining the CTO with the light blue to get a nice yet warm steel blue color.
The gobo package on this light is something that is amazing. One rotating and one static gobo wheel, and unlike some other fixtures, I can actually layer gobos and iris and prism and make things look good. The gobos in the light are almost the same as a MAC700 gobo in size; in fact if you have custom gobos for a MAC700 there's a good chance they'll work. The measurements are very close. I was at first not in to the bar and triangle gobos on the rotating wheel, and then I started to layer them with the four excellent breakups (dots, triangles, natural, construction) on the static wheel. Good things happened.
While the static wheel is glued in, it does look like you could swap the gobos out if you were good with a razor and silicone adhesive and wanted to void your warranty. Which would be something I'd do if I owned some of these personally, because the one gobo that I don't like on the static wheel is the Trism from the Studio Spot 250 - not enough light out of that thing. Maybe a fat trism, or some other cool triangle pattern would be a good plan? The one gobo that surprised me on the static wheel was the "construction" gobo - it's from the Apollo catalog, I think, and it's great. It's asymmetrical, it's got some good diagonal stuff going on, and it works great with the prism and CTO. Killer for high side light, I think. And with the indexable prism, you can make it be wider closer and narrower further away.
Back to the bar & triangle gobos though, there are a lot of variations out there and maybe for the next version of this light - R2.2 Spot mayhap - they can come up with a unique bar and a unique triangle. Signature gobos are always a good thing to have in a light. The one gobo that I am far from sold on (but @Pie4Weebl says looks great in haze) is the stick man gobo. I've gotten some great responses to that, including "that's the weirdest gobo I've ever seen" and "that's creepy". Again, if I had the choice of replacing gobos for myself, I'd put the Apollo MS-1041 Crazy Blocks gobo in place of the stick men. On the other end of the spectrum though, the circle of ovals gobo is one of the absolute coolest gobos in haze. It's a killer look. It also makes the glad that the rotating gobos - and the prism - are completely indexable.
I suggested to Chauvet (@Ford in particular) that they come out with a theatrical gobo pack for this light, since I see a lot of schools and theaters being interested in it for being an affordable moving light. Yes, you can order whatever gobos you want, but I see something like the gobo pack as an easy and economical way to add one line-item to the PO and get a useful package of gobos. Maybe the Le Mis whirlpool (a la MAC700), a nice dust breakup (a la VL "dust" gobo), a nice cobblestone/pebble breakup, and a nice linear/water breakup. These would all be able to go in the rotating wheel.
Next up is the effects package. We've got a 3-facet prism that's great for a faux zoom as well as adding rotational motion to the static wheel gobos, an iris that is wicked fast, and a frost - which is on or off, not variable. The prism is indexable and rotatable, which could be very useful for tiling gobos on a stage. The iris has some very cool macros, including some that I haven't seen before. Very useful for quick iris effects when you don't have time to program them on the console. It also layers well with the gobos for really cool effects.
What sets this light apart from so many others is the frost. It's not something you often think about with spot fixtures, but frost - and the right hardness of frost - is especially useful for a light like this. You've got some fixtures on one end that barely frost at all, making you wish you could defocus more to widen the beam when frosted. On the other end, you've got some other lights, where the frost blows the light out beyond all recognition. In the middle, you've got this fixture, which has a very nice frost that would be able to provide a good wash. The frost is not variable - it's in or it's not. When it's in, you don't see any gobos or other beam effects. If they were to make the frost in the next iteration in to a dual-flag toothed frost system that was variable, that would be even more awesome.
The innards of the R2 are pretty beefy compared to what I would expect. Nice belts. The gobo size, as I mentioned above, is great. Way better than the actually-dime-size gobos that I've had to deal with on some other lights. The head cover fixes my main complaint with the Q-Spot line, specifically the 560. On those lights, the rubber gasket for the head cover was not attached to one side. On this unit the gasket does appear to be glued on. Or else it was shoved much tighter on to one side as to make it hard to remove. Either way, much better. I hated having that gasket flapping around when I opened the light. Hanging hardware is via a pair of omega brackets which Chauvet says will fit any Rogue, Legend, or Next series fixture which is great to hear. Omega brackets are the way to go.
Everyone I've shown it to is interested. One school wants to buy 6. Another local production co. already bought some for themselves after doing their own shootout, and another company that I work for occasionally 2 states over also just invested in them. In addition, a local theater already has 2 and another school bought 1 with the intention to buy more, and that's only the ones that I know about.
In short:
Pros:
Output, flat field, 2 color wheels, great gobo selection, full effects package, speed, price, LED.
Cons (notice how picky I have to get for these):
2 close color pairs, stick men gobo, non-variable frost.
Holy cannoli that was a long winded review. I hope it has proved useful to some of you.
I'm usually that guy who will show up to the fixture demo with console personality and screwdrivers in hand, ready to make your fixture show me all of its flaws, so one person at work was joking that I almost went too easy on this one, or else it really is that good.
First of all, kudos to Chauvet for making a line (the Rogue line) that's not only ridiculously affordable but very feature-rich. If you're looking for movers to add to your space, check out the Rogue line.
The main question everyone wants to know after reading the spec sheet is "how bright is it?" Well, there are several ways to answer that. For one, it blew our older Studio Spot 575s out of the water. No contest, but that's what we were expecting. After confirming that, we did a lineup with a MAC700 Profile (700W arc source, 7500K), VL3500 Spot (1200W arc source, 6000K), and the Rogue R2 spot. The lamp in the MAC700 was brand new that day, the lamp in the VL3500 Spot was about a third or so in to its life. Also to be fair, the MAC700 and VL3500 have multi-lens zoom systems on them to cut down on output, while the R2 just has a fixed-angle 16.5 degree lens.
In white, the MAC700 looked about as bright (a little bit brighter than the R2 in the center due to hot spot, and definitely noticeably dimmer than the R2 on the edges, again due to hot spot). The VL3500 Spot was noticeably brighter in the center, and about the same intensity at the edges. The R2 had what I would call an almost perfectly flat field. Let me repeat that. The R2 had what I would call an almost perfectly flat field. One of the shop techs that walked by told me it had to be fake because no moving light could have that flat of a field.
With all 3 lights up, the R2 looked cooler yet at the same time pinker than the VL3500 or the MAC700. I suspect that this is due to the high green content of the discharge lamps, because without the other fixtures up next to it it looks very white, albeit with a high color temp.
Where it gets interesting is where we start putting colors in. With the VL3500 Spot and R2 Spot both with the dark orange color chip in and both fixtures pointed at the wall, they looked almost identical. Some of the production staff and salespeople stopped by, and none of them could believe what they were looking at. The VL3500 Spot had a slight edge over the R2, but it was only in the center where the hot spot was. One of the guys said "I didn't even think we'd be looking at this with anything close to a 1200W source." After all, it's "just" a 240W LED!
The MAC700 didn't have a color chip on the wheel that matched, and as expected when I mixed to an orange that was close, it was dimmer than the R2. Subtractive color mixing with saturated colors can really take the fight out of a light. We received a similar result with dark blue, which the R2's higher color temp helped out with, I'm sure. This thing blew away every single output expectation we had for it, that's for sure. Now to be fair, this is just to the naked eye up on a wall, but then again I think that's actually a pretty good test.
It's also LED, so that means that when you bring the fader down, it's off. When you shut it down, there's no lamp-off and cool-down sequence that you hope your students/volunteers/board-ops remember after you leave them to run your rig of movers. There's no heavy ballast, and no lamps to replace.
So we've covered output. Next up, color system. We've got 2 fixed color wheels here. Both capable of split colors, which Chauvet has included as defined points on the color channels rather than having to slowly scroll through on your encoder trying to find that point where the split between the colors is in the center. There are two CTO filters that really do look great. The full CTO filter is pretty fantastic, and looks more authentic than the CTO chip on the MAC700 or the variable CTO on the VL3500. There are also some color pairs that look great as split colors.
One thing that I did not like about the colors is that there are A) two very close pairs, and B) two glaring (in my opinion) gaps. First, the pairs: there are two medium dark blues and two oranges that are ridiculously close. No need to have two colors that close on a fixture with fixed wheels. Second, the gaps: no lavender, no amber, and no good way to mix either. Unfortunately, the color chips are glued in. I will say though that having two color wheels is pretty fantastic, and they're both pretty snappy. You can combine something like the slicing green-leaning yellow on wheel 1 with the full CTO on wheel 2 to get a nice, almost "canary" yellow. Plenty of other combos exist too, including combining the CTO with the light blue to get a nice yet warm steel blue color.
The gobo package on this light is something that is amazing. One rotating and one static gobo wheel, and unlike some other fixtures, I can actually layer gobos and iris and prism and make things look good. The gobos in the light are almost the same as a MAC700 gobo in size; in fact if you have custom gobos for a MAC700 there's a good chance they'll work. The measurements are very close. I was at first not in to the bar and triangle gobos on the rotating wheel, and then I started to layer them with the four excellent breakups (dots, triangles, natural, construction) on the static wheel. Good things happened.
While the static wheel is glued in, it does look like you could swap the gobos out if you were good with a razor and silicone adhesive and wanted to void your warranty. Which would be something I'd do if I owned some of these personally, because the one gobo that I don't like on the static wheel is the Trism from the Studio Spot 250 - not enough light out of that thing. Maybe a fat trism, or some other cool triangle pattern would be a good plan? The one gobo that surprised me on the static wheel was the "construction" gobo - it's from the Apollo catalog, I think, and it's great. It's asymmetrical, it's got some good diagonal stuff going on, and it works great with the prism and CTO. Killer for high side light, I think. And with the indexable prism, you can make it be wider closer and narrower further away.
Back to the bar & triangle gobos though, there are a lot of variations out there and maybe for the next version of this light - R2.2 Spot mayhap - they can come up with a unique bar and a unique triangle. Signature gobos are always a good thing to have in a light. The one gobo that I am far from sold on (but @Pie4Weebl says looks great in haze) is the stick man gobo. I've gotten some great responses to that, including "that's the weirdest gobo I've ever seen" and "that's creepy". Again, if I had the choice of replacing gobos for myself, I'd put the Apollo MS-1041 Crazy Blocks gobo in place of the stick men. On the other end of the spectrum though, the circle of ovals gobo is one of the absolute coolest gobos in haze. It's a killer look. It also makes the glad that the rotating gobos - and the prism - are completely indexable.
I suggested to Chauvet (@Ford in particular) that they come out with a theatrical gobo pack for this light, since I see a lot of schools and theaters being interested in it for being an affordable moving light. Yes, you can order whatever gobos you want, but I see something like the gobo pack as an easy and economical way to add one line-item to the PO and get a useful package of gobos. Maybe the Le Mis whirlpool (a la MAC700), a nice dust breakup (a la VL "dust" gobo), a nice cobblestone/pebble breakup, and a nice linear/water breakup. These would all be able to go in the rotating wheel.
Next up is the effects package. We've got a 3-facet prism that's great for a faux zoom as well as adding rotational motion to the static wheel gobos, an iris that is wicked fast, and a frost - which is on or off, not variable. The prism is indexable and rotatable, which could be very useful for tiling gobos on a stage. The iris has some very cool macros, including some that I haven't seen before. Very useful for quick iris effects when you don't have time to program them on the console. It also layers well with the gobos for really cool effects.
What sets this light apart from so many others is the frost. It's not something you often think about with spot fixtures, but frost - and the right hardness of frost - is especially useful for a light like this. You've got some fixtures on one end that barely frost at all, making you wish you could defocus more to widen the beam when frosted. On the other end, you've got some other lights, where the frost blows the light out beyond all recognition. In the middle, you've got this fixture, which has a very nice frost that would be able to provide a good wash. The frost is not variable - it's in or it's not. When it's in, you don't see any gobos or other beam effects. If they were to make the frost in the next iteration in to a dual-flag toothed frost system that was variable, that would be even more awesome.
The innards of the R2 are pretty beefy compared to what I would expect. Nice belts. The gobo size, as I mentioned above, is great. Way better than the actually-dime-size gobos that I've had to deal with on some other lights. The head cover fixes my main complaint with the Q-Spot line, specifically the 560. On those lights, the rubber gasket for the head cover was not attached to one side. On this unit the gasket does appear to be glued on. Or else it was shoved much tighter on to one side as to make it hard to remove. Either way, much better. I hated having that gasket flapping around when I opened the light. Hanging hardware is via a pair of omega brackets which Chauvet says will fit any Rogue, Legend, or Next series fixture which is great to hear. Omega brackets are the way to go.
Everyone I've shown it to is interested. One school wants to buy 6. Another local production co. already bought some for themselves after doing their own shootout, and another company that I work for occasionally 2 states over also just invested in them. In addition, a local theater already has 2 and another school bought 1 with the intention to buy more, and that's only the ones that I know about.
In short:
Pros:
Output, flat field, 2 color wheels, great gobo selection, full effects package, speed, price, LED.
Cons (notice how picky I have to get for these):
2 close color pairs, stick men gobo, non-variable frost.
Holy cannoli that was a long winded review. I hope it has proved useful to some of you.