I had a demo of it today. At full it's a perfect match for the
HPL 575 long life lamp. It's very hard to tell the difference. Dim it a little and you go oh crap, no
amber drift. Dim it a lot and you are quickly reminded of how much you love the amber warm goodness of
incandescent lights. That said, it dims beautifully and smoothly when on
DMX control. It's a wonderful
flat field. Then we switched to
dimmer control instead of
dmx and things got ugly. It was VERY steppy as you dimmed it down. Turn it on at a moderately fast pace and it pops on instead of fades on. Turn it from 0-7% and it wait 2+ seconds as it slowly turns on. There apparently is a
capacitor in there that has to charge up for it to kick on or something. The sales guy said yesterday he had a lot of time and they were able to tweak the dimming curve and set the board so off is actually 3% (keeping a little
juice in the
capacitor) and it wasn't steppy at all and the slow response on was fixed as well. We unfortunately didn't have time to see if we could get it to
play well with my
system.
So, on one
hand I was very impressed with the quality and quantity of light at full. Dimming via
dmx was perfectly smooth. On the other
hand there is some work to be done when using dimmed
power. And I was reminded how lovely the ability to glow the
stage in amber goodness at 30% is. I have worked with this particular sales guy for years and trust him when he says that he got it dialed in and working perfectly. However he also admitted that it may not be possible to adjust the curve on every
system to make it dim correctly. So for those with older boards and dimmers... particularly not
ETC, you may not be able to dim it the way you want.
For some of us this is a no brainer
purchase at a great price. For others it may be a
dimmer curve nightmare that can't be fixed. So as with any product,
call your dealer and get a demo to see if it'll work for you. As for me, I'm interested but more interested to see where it goes in future variations.