Should
point out here that the discontinued
Strand 200 and the now-imported and not Strand-designed
Strand 200 Plus are two very different beasts. The 200 Plus sounds like a half baked Smartfade ML. Oddly enough, Elation used to sell the very same imported
console under the name Trio. No one bought them and they were discontinued.
On the other
hand, I've heard nothing but good things about the
Strand 250ML, and I liked working with it after a short demo.
However, we're talking about low end here. I like the Chauvet
Stage Designer 50. It's got 4 pages of 12 submasters each, but each
submaster can also be a
chase with rate set via a
fader or tap tempo or set to
manual trigger via the step
button, much like a go
button. So you can have pages of mini cue-lists. You can only have one active at a time though if you want them to act like that. It's got 2 pages of 24 channels of control, giving you 48 channels, plus 2 independents on rotary pots.
The main issue with the SD50 is the very poor
manual. I learned half of what I did on it by just poking around and seeing what I could accomplish after figuring out the
console's logic (or lack thereof). In short, I made it work pretty well for some
RGB LED cans,
halogen pars, and some small effects lights. I still have it but some of the faders are having issues and since I don't
power it up often I'd have to reprogram it every time as there's no way to save memory and the storage doesn't keep if you leave it unplugged for months at a time.
if you can find a good condition used NSI MC7532 for cheap, that's 64 channels of control with 32 submasters for cheap (I've seen good ones go for 300-500 on ebay every now and then). Great boards because they're built very solid (much more so than the 70xx series) and very easy to program. I had one installed a student club in college running conventionals and a dozen
RGB LED PARs (not all individually, I think there were 6 groups of control for those - 2 fixtures ganged together for each).