Chauvet Color Consistency

I've seen a lot of discussion about the quality of brands like Chauvet Pro (and Elation Pro) being much better now than it used to be, but I haven't seen much on this part of it:

I've been working with our local Barbizon branch to purchase a bunch of LED wash fixtures to help shove our theatre into the 21st century. The Colorsource Par is the high-bar for our budget, but I asked them for suggestions on Chauvet equipment. Their response was that, while Chauvet has gotten better, you still can't rely on them for things like color matching/LED binning. So, if we bought 6 today and 6 of the same fixture in a year, they wouldn't match, whereas ETC or Chroma-Q's fixtures would.

Don't get me wrong, I love ETC's fixtures, but if we can get 1/3 more of a comparable Chauvet fixture for the same total price... you know how it is.

So, does anyone have any experience here? Is Chauvet's LED binning really that bad?

It is what you make it.

Their Ovation line is pretty good.

Obviously ETC is top of their game and nothing compares to what they offer. Quality without quantity and support to back it.

But you are correct for the price you can beat 3 to 1 on the fixtures.

Comparing Chaveut to ETC is IMO still like comparing apples to oranges still.

I would be surprised if, a year or 18 months from now ETC does not have a new flavor of the colorsource out there so you are unlikely to be able to match what you buy now with what you buy in 18 months anyway.

If you bought 6 today and 6 a year from now, binning has nothing to do with it. Fixtures that are burned-in over the period of a year will naturally be darker in whichever LED elements are on the most -- regardless of who you buy from. Remains to be seen if this will be a pronounced issue for our industry, but it's entirely possible the solution to this is that in 7-8 years older fixtures are moved to back/effects/side/flash-n-trash positions where consistency isn't as mission-critical, and the cyc/front/down/scenery lighting is done with the newer fixtures.

Everyone's going to have a new generation of LED fixtures in 2-3 years that'll be even brighter and cheaper so I think the days are gone of it making much sense to keep purchasing matching fixtures as time goes on. You'll buy the newest, greatest thing, either as a compliment to your existing inventory or as a replacement of it. You'll save the lens tubes and maybe the diffusion filters and frames. If we're lucky, maybe it'll be possible to just issue a new generation of emitter arrays in the same fixture body, but nobody's shown proof-of-concept on that product evolution yet.

It's not insignificant that Chauvet Professional has been able to rise to upper tiers of the industry over just the last couple years. Whatever preconceived notions anyone may have about Chauvet, you sure don't hear a lot about Altman/Phillips in the wild. The other major powerhouses for stage lighting fixtures haven't been able to keep up with either Chauvet or ETC.

By the way, I think you'll find that most people who try to rationalize why they think Chauvet is cheaper are talking out of their butts. I would certainly like to know myself, but you'll hear a lot of people speak confidently about that Chauvet's fixture won't last as long as ETC's, won't be supported as well, or won't have the same color consistency. They don't actually know that. They're guessing. In spite of their authoritative demeanor, they're generally not speaking from a place of personal, first-hand certainty. Nobody knows what the life-cycle of fixtures is going to look like over 10 years from now. Not from Chauvet, and not from ETC.

I use the COLORado 72 a bunch of times and find the colors do not match up well on all of the fixtures. I end up rehanging athe fixtures a bunch of times till I come up with a color wash that is not obviously not well blended.

I would just like to point out that ETC started selling Selador Classic fixtures in 2009. We are still shipping them now in the original arrays. ColorSource has been shipping since 2015.

When Source 4 LED Series 2 came out, we lowered the price of the Series 1 and continued to ship them. There are no guarantees in this business but ETC has a pretty good track record of supporting our customers over time.

Sorry for the interruption... carry on.

A lot of companies will continue to make an older product even after it had been replaced with a newer brighter one, as long as people are willing to buy them. Chauvet has not done that, especially where the product had significant limitations to begin with and has had some lower end products with shorter life cycles, because a new technology made the old model obsolete faster than expected. For the top-end, like the Ovation, Rouge, and Maverick lines, they seem to be planning much longer life cycles now that LED technology has caught up to and surpassed incandescent and arc lamps in many cases. For example, the R2 wash sells extremely well and nobody complains that it's not bright enough. It meets all of the requirements for a compact wash light. Need a bigger light? Buy an R3 wash. Same reason why ETC source fours with 575 or 750w lamps have lasted so long. They already meet our needs. There was no compelling reason to mess with something good. Having bought many Chauvet fixtures over the last few years, I can tell you there are no binning issues within the same product line, that seems to be an issue of the past. Now going between products, like a Colordash and a Colorado(any two products that use different led sources), the dimming and color responses are not the same, so that may be something to consider if mixing product lines. I don't find this to be a huge issue, for the most part, but I would not mix product lines on the same cyc for example.

MNicolai said:

If you bought 6 today and 6 a year from now, binning has nothing to do with it. Fixtures that are burned-in over the period of a year will naturally be darker in whichever LED elements are on the most -- regardless of who you buy from. Remains to be seen if this will be a pronounced issue for our industry, but it's entirely possible the solution to this is that in 7-8 years older fixtures are moved to back/effects/side/flash-n-trash positions where consistency isn't as mission-critical, and the cyc/front/down/scenery lighting is done with the newer fixtures.

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Yes. Fixtures will change color with use, it doesn't matter what the brand, it's just what happens when an LED is used. You need to buy them all at once or they will not match. You can't blame any manufacturer for this.

MNicolai said:

It's not insignificant that Chauvet Professional has been able to rise to upper tiers of the industry over just the last couple years. Whatever preconceived notions anyone may have about Chauvet, you sure don't hear a lot about Altman/Phillips in the wild. The other major powerhouses for stage lighting fixtures haven't been able to keep up with either Chauvet or ETC.

By the way, I think you'll find that most people who try to rationalize why they think Chauvet is cheaper are talking out of their butts. I would certainly like to know myself, but you'll hear a lot of people speak confidently about that Chauvet's fixture won't last as long as ETC's, won't be supported as well, or won't have the same color consistency. They don't actually know that. They're guessing. In spite of their authoritative demeanor, they're generally not speaking from a place of personal, first-hand certainty. Nobody knows what the life-cycle of fixtures is going to look like over 10 years from now. Not from Chauvet, and not from ETC.

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Can't agree more with you Mike. ETC has been the king for a long time. Their service is stellar. They support EVERY product ever made. About 2 years ago a friend of mine had this old Express 24/48 that handled all his theater's needs but was just getting old and having issues. He sent it back to ETC, and paid them to do a full refurbishment of it. He got back what looked and operated like a brand new console. NOBODY has service like that, in any industry. At the same time you have to look at the big picture in the industry. Remember when the debate was between buying ETC and Strand? Chauvet has kicked them and everyone else to the curb in the last 5 years. All of them are making inferior products to Chauvet now. Should you choose Chauvet over ETC? Depends on the product's actual performance in your space and how you feel about guaranteed ability to get service in 15 years. But anyone who doesn't consider Chauvet as a serious contender is living in the past. Personally My last two major lighting purchases were a set of ColorSource Pars and a set of Ovation Batten lights. Both were excellent purchases and the right tool for the job. Yes, I don't have the same 100% confidence that Chauvet will support those fixtures a decade into the future that I have in ETC. But, I know that Chauvet has their game faces on. They are a solid #2 in the market right now. While I doubt they will dethrone ETC, I believe we will see them pushing ETC every step of the way. They are also listening (Hi Berenice! or at least Ben) they have heard the message that reliability and service are two words that are REALLY important to us. They know that there are concerns from the past and they are working very hard to prove our old concerns to be nothing.

peacefulone61 said:

I use the COLORado 72 a bunch of times and find the colors do not match up well on all of the fixtures. I end up rehanging a the fixtures a bunch of times till I come up with a color wash that is not obviously not well blended.

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The COLORADO 72 has been around a few years and I think represents a more transitional fixture in the Chauvet product history. It's clearly not a DJ fixture, but not the same quality level as the newest Ovations, Maveriks, and Rogues. So while it's too bad, it doesn't surprise me that there may be some issues. I tested out some of the Colorado LED PARS about two years ago, they were okay but not nearly as good as the current products.

Jim Uphoff said:

I would just like to point out that ETC started selling Selador Classic fixtures in 2009. We are still shipping them now in the original arrays. ColorSource has been shipping since 2015.
When Source 4 LED Series 2 came out, we lowered the price of the Series 1 and continued to ship them. There are no guarantees in this business but ETC has a pretty good track record of supporting our customers over time.

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Absolutely true Jim and this is the reason ETC is still the king and others are buried in your wake. There are a lot of us out here who have been "Strand-ed" with gear that we can't get service for any longer and we are VERY skeptical. Service and loyalty are VERY important to people in this industry. The fact that Steve Terry somehow from a late night CB private message found my home number and made sure I was overnighted a single bolt that was missing off the yoke of a brand new PARnel is a significant reason that I will always consider ETC products first. Still don't know how they found me!

Jim Uphoff said:

I would just like to point out that ETC started selling Selador Classic fixtures in 2009. We are still shipping them now in the original arrays. ColorSource has been shipping since 2015.

When Source 4 LED Series 2 came out, we lowered the price of the Series 1 and continued to ship them. There are no guarantees in this business but ETC has a pretty good track record of supporting our customers over time.

Sorry for the interruption... carry on.

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I am just curious about the real world life time of LED fixtures. Some are listed as 20,000 hours, some for 50,000 hours, some companies even list 100,000 hours. Have any of those original fixtures reached that time in real use?

JohnD said:

I am just curious about the real world life time of LED fixtures. Some are listed as 20,000 hours, some for 50,000 hours, some companies even list 100,000 hours. Have any of those original fixtures reached that time in real use?

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With the exception of architectural installs, I doubt many fixtures have ever made it close to the limit before being taken out of service for a different reason.

I don't personally find this to be a concern. The reality is that LED spent much less time "on" than an arc based moving light, and even in the case of pars or cyc lights, sometimes they are only in blue, other times only red. So even though they are on just a long as conventionals, because they are often not at full for each led, they live is further prolonged. Even a "low" rated 20,000 hr fixture would still last as long as 66 standard HPL lamps. If you actually used all of those hours, even really nice LED par, is cheaper than buying 66 lamps.

By the time LEDs actually wear out, the current product line will be so much better, you will be looking for a reason to upgrade.

At a rock show, fixtures get lamped on during load-in, then they pretty much stay on until the end of the show. You might have 10-12 hours of the lamps burning, just because someone is updating their show throughout the day. With LEDs, the actual runtime could be 3-4 hours. We are looking at 5000 show days, the rest of the moving parts in the fixture will wear out before the light source.

Jim Uphoff said:

I would just like to point out that ETC started selling Selador Classic fixtures in 2009. We are still shipping them now in the original arrays. ColorSource has been shipping since 2015.

When Source 4 LED Series 2 came out, we lowered the price of the Series 1 and continued to ship them. There are no guarantees in this business but ETC has a pretty good track record of supporting our customers over time.

Sorry for the interruption... carry on.

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While true, can you still get D40's with the original glass "lens" at the face of the fixture? Or just the plastic ones. (Not the diffusion, built into the fixture itself) I know we encountered an issue when buying some additional D40's where the new ones had less output than the original ones, and the suggest was to dim down the old ones...

I had some hands-on time with the Chauvet's Ovation lineup yesterday at their HQ outside of Miami. Can't speak for every fixture they sell but all of the fixtures I tested yesterday had White Balance control in the menu that you could use to color-match your fixtures to account for burn-in.

What would be really cool if there was a camera you could buy/rent every few years to recalibrate your fixtures against a white surface that would spit out the 0-255 values you need to get them approximately matched.

Sorry I missed you!
I am just returning to the office today.
I'd have loved to have given you the grand-tour... Although Gaff may have been bummed out if you got the tour before he does.

Ford said:

Sorry I missed you!
I am just returning to the office today.
I'd have loved to have given you the grand-tour... Although Gaff may have been bummed out if you got the tour before he does.

Click to expand...

I'll be back before long. Really need to dig into Chamsys when I've got some time to burn.

Dwight and I spent most of the afternoon putting fixtures through the ringer, but we had a least a few minutes to do the nickel tour through sales/service/support/QAQC. It was nice to see that customer support can basically throw a tennis ball down the hallway to knock someone in the repairs department about something.

I've got a couple change orders to issue on E910-FC projects after seeing the new E930-VW fixture yesterday. I wasn't looking side-by-side with an incandescent source but dialed into 3200K the E930-VW looked remarkably what I would've expected out of an incandescent source, while still being able to dial up individual colors (albeit without the same punch in the saturated colors as the E910-FC can spit out).

Some thoughts:
Buying LED fixtures today is like buying a computer in the 90s. By the time you get it home, something better has hit the market. Not much you can do about that as were are in one of those times!
As mentioned above, LEDs don't have much "on time" in the theater and we may all be dead by the time one accumulates 50,000 hours of real-world use. By the time you hit the 6 year mark, the product will be so obsolete you won't care anyhow and will probably replace it.
As for life, I have a good chuckle at the forecasts like 50,000 hours! Really? Did they put a project hold on product while they ran a batch for 50,000 hours?
So, the only real "long term" tests we have so far are architectural LED lamps. I put in about 500 four years ago... How's the 20 year lifespan? FORGET IT! Main failures are often the electronics, but I have seen plenty of the LEDs themselves fail. Often, you will have a chain of 40 to 80 of them in series and it only takes one early failure and the chain is out. (You often see this in traffic lights.) Out of the 500 that went into service, 50 have been replaced. Still, 10% in 4 years isn't bad, and the electrical savings more than offset the replacement lamps. (Remember, I am talking about the A19, BR30, and other screw in replacements.) Time will tell if there is a log curve or if it stays at about a dozen a year. Still a good deal, but as I said, the projected lifespan is... well.. a joke.

Now , color.
I think the concern expressed has to do with initial color. Although non-phosphor LED's tend to be stable depending on the crystal substract, and therefore "new" color will not vary much, the same cannot be said about phosphor based LEDs. One could reasonably expect that a batch of phosphor used in one production run may have a different mix in the next production run, and the color would shift. Here is where QA comes into play. Inexpensive products usually have less Quality Assurance on them, so there would be some reason to have concern about the units produced one year as compared to the next year, especially on entry level units. Best bet would be to buy your whole expected lot at the same time. Still, if some are used more than other, you may still pick up unit-to-unit variance as LEDs, especially phosphor based, do age and change color.
Hope this helps.

danTt said:

While true, can you still get D40's with the original glass "lens" at the face of the fixture? Or just the plastic ones. (Not the diffusion, built into the fixture itself) I know we encountered an issue when buying some additional D40's where the new ones had less output than the original ones, and the suggest was to dim down the old ones...

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The change that you are referring to was a change to a single piece optic from individual optics for each LED. In this process, we also built in some diffusion that worked in a similar fashion to the Very Narrow (VN) diffusion that we used to ship with. This is why we no longer include that diffusion. This was done because it made manufacturing more reliable and most, if not all, customers used some diffusion anyway.

Ford said:

Sorry I missed you! I am just returning to the office today. I'd have loved to have given you the grand-tour... Although Gaff may have been bummed out if you got the tour before he does.

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YEAH!! Back off @MNicolai!!

I do like your idea of a calibration tool though.

JD said:

Some thoughts:
Buying LED fixtures today is like buying a computer in the 90s. By the time you get it home, something better has hit the market. Not much you can do about that as were are in one of those times!
As mentioned above, LEDs don't have much "on time" in the theater and we may all be dead by the time one accumulates 50,000 hours of real-world use. By the time you hit the 6 year mark, the product will be so obsolete you won't care anyhow and will probably replace it.
As for life, I have a good chuckle at the forecasts like 50,000 hours! Really? Did they put a project hold on product while they ran a batch for 50,000 hours?
So, the only real "long term" tests we have so far are architectural LED lamps. I put in about 500 four years ago... How's the 20 year lifespan? FORGET IT! Main failures are often the electronics, but I have seen plenty of the LEDs themselves fail. Often, you will have a chain of 40 to 80 of them in series and it only takes one early failure and the chain is out. (You often see this in traffic lights.) Out of the 500 that went into service, 50 have been replaced. Still, 10% in 4 years isn't bad, and the electrical savings more than offset the replacement lamps. (Remember, I am talking about the A19, BR30, and other screw in replacements.) Time will tell if there is a log curve or if it stays at about a dozen a year. Still a good deal, but as I said, the projected lifespan is... well.. a joke.

Now , color.
I think the concern expressed has to do with initial color. Although non-phosphor LED's tend to be stable depending on the crystal substract, and therefore "new" color will not vary much, the same cannot be said about phosphor based LEDs. One could reasonably expect that a batch of phosphor used in one production run may have a different mix in the next production run, and the color would shift. Here is where QA comes into play. Inexpensive products usually have less Quality Assurance on them, so there would be some reason to have concern about the units produced one year as compared to the next year, especially on entry level units. Best bet would be to buy your whole expected lot at the same time. Still, if some are used more than other, you may still pick up unit-to-unit variance as LEDs, especially phosphor based, do age and change color.
Hope this helps.

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The 50,000 hour (or whatever number is reported) listing represents the information from an L70 report that is provided by the manufacturer of the LEDs to the fixture manufacturers. It is a calculation based on an actual burn of those LEDs (usually 10,000 hours) that is then extrapolated by a factor of 6 to get the final result. The issue can be that not only is it a calculation, but these tests are not always done on all of the types of LEDs available. This means that there is often some estimations (educated guesses) on this data that is then calculated. Because of this, ETC started doing these test on our actual fixtures, not just taking the reports on the components. We burned our Series 2 Lustr at a third party lab for 10,000 hours (yes that is just over a year) to get accurate L70 results. What we found was that our conservative estimates, which had been 20,000 hours were low. We recently upped that number, based on the actual testing, to 54,000 hours. We have more fixtures in test... stay tuned...

Jim

MNicolai said:

What would be really cool if there was a camera you could buy/rent every few years to recalibrate your fixtures against a white surface that would spit out the 0-255 values you need to get them approximately matched.

Click to expand...

gafftaper said:

I do like your idea of a calibration tool though.

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Someone already thought of this, and has a patent on it actually.

But.

How much would you pay for this to happen?
Would you want it to be a once a year thing, once a week? Every time you swap a fixture?
What if you needed to add additional devices at the fixture to deal with the processing?
The closer and closer you get to no outputted light is the closer and closer you get to a perfect match. That's because with no output the colors match.
Are you looking a reflected light, or emitted light?

Essentially it comes down to cost. The cheap units used to measure emitted light accurately are around $30k.

Another question: We've never had perfect colors, gels would get burnt out, gel colors wouldn't match perfectly. Why are we just now striving for perfection?

Some things to consider.

S