Church-
Can you provide more details on how you customized them? Any photos of them in action?
normally the fixtures come with sixteen red, sixteen blue and sixteen green LEDs. We asked MS Lighting if they also supplied them with White and Amber LEDs - they said yes they could supply them with RGBW at no extra cost: sixteen green, sixteen blue LEDs, eight red and eight white. They can also supply
RGBAW for an small charge - although no had asked for this before. It would add another control
channel and they wanted us to say what
LED mix we wanted.
We had purchased one of the
RGB fixtures just to try it out - we figured it was worth chancing $245 to evaluate a
fixture. It worked out well enough and we pulled it apart to see how well it was built and how it worked. We put it back together after stripping it down and still works fine.
It uses surface mount LEDs so there is no orientation variation between the LEDs, there is a
lens that fits over each
LED. The LEDs are in series chains of 8 LEDs each, there is a single pulse width modulation
driver for each colour driving the LEDs through a
power transistor.. The housing is a single aluminium extrusion with end caps. The
LED board is mounted directly onto the extrusion with a layer of
heat sink compound to provide a decent
heat sink. The
power supply is a seperate
unit in its own case that fits inside the housing. The housing is black anodised and it has survived rough handling. The boards are all FR4 glass fibre. We were surprised at the
build quality for the price.
The LEDs are matched there is no discernable colour difference between any LEDs in any of the fixtures. My friend also bought six and we often use all twelve together.
I do not know the
beam angle but it is fairly narrow. I normally place them no more than three feet from the wall and three feet apart and angle them towards the wall. They will light the wall of a gym 25 feet high and also
cover part of the ceiling. I do not have any photos I will try and get some. I also use them to
wash the wall before the choir comes onto the "
stage" and they are capable of washing the wall with saturated colour even with the normal gym lights on.
The things I do not like are:
1) the touch panel membrane buttons are a
bit too small for my fingers.
2) the original mounting brackets - replaced with yokes
3) when fading up from zero they do not turn on until 20% and the
dimmer curve could be a
bit smoother it is about the same standard as the
Elation Professional and NSI
shoebox dimmers. Strangely enough they are smoother fading using their own internal programmed routines. I have used them with
Colortran, Elation and
ETC boards and the behaviour is the same.
4) the original
power connectors - I cut them off and replaced them with
Leviton U grounds.
5) The 3 pin XLRs (black colour which is nice) but the quality of the
connector is not as good as a
Neutrik connector and the 26
gauge DMX cable is too flimsy. These have survived six months of rental work but will need to be replaced shortly - not a big deal and a cheap modification.
The
strobe feature is good - you can
strobe all LEDs simultaneously to give a white around 4500K or you can
strobe in Red, Blue or Green. You can run in four
channel mode or seven. The four
channel works well on a
theatre board where you can program your own chases
etc.
We also use them for R&R shows and they hold their own with a rig of 24
PAR 64s with 1kW lamps. I also use them with a rig of S4 PARs and again they are okay.
Not perfect but pretty darn good for $245 each. All in all they have convinced me that LEDs are a useful tool and acceptable performance is achievable at a reasonable price. As the technology improves in the next year or so the performance will become phenomenal.
I should mention that my friend has one that has a failed
LED - we are waiting for MS Lighting to
send a replacement and some extra spare LEDs just in case.