Chauvet Ovation B2805FC (LED Cyc Lights) Review

gafftaper

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After a year of pestering @Ben Dickmann and @Ford on the floor of the trade shows, I finally made the leap and purchased a set of 7 Chauvet Ovation B2805FC's for my theater. After about two weeks of working with them, I'm VERY happy with them and know I made the right choice.

My first impression taking them out of the box is that these are high quality fixtures. They are heavy. Little things like the way you adjust the tightness of the tilt on the hanging brackets are just really well done. The programming menu is easy to navigate and easy to flip the orientation. When you power them up even at top fan speed they are still VERY quiet, yet you feel a decent amount of airflow coming through the vents. They are designed to be both flexible and easily daisy chained with inputs for 3pin and 5pin DMX, RJ45 EtherCon, and PowerCon on one end, and the outputs on the other end. Setup was a breeze.

With the RGBAL LED emitters, the light quality is beautiful! It does a dark purple that looks like UV. Thanks to the lime emitters Yellow, Amber, and Green really Pop off the cyc. After so many years of frustration trying to make a decent yellow, amber, or purple with my old gel cyc lights I'm in heaven.

They are FREAKING BRIGHT! I have 7 of the 5' 9" long version a continuous end to end setup, covering the entire onstage portion of my cyc. I seriously doubt I'll ever run them at 100%... in fact I think it'll be rare that I ever kick them up over 60%! I probabliy would have been fine with 6 of them... maybe 5 although there wouldn't be the wonderfully smooth blend with gaps between fixtures. So look at this. Here's 100% Blue only at 100% brightness. It looks good, but the picture doesn't capture how bright it really is.
IMG_20170802_182011.jpg

So let's go up on stage and turn around to face the house. In the picture below, every light in the theater is off except the cycs.
IMG_20170802_182052.jpg

Again, CRAZY bright! My sales guy tells me that he sold a full top and bottom set to a nearby college. The T.D. says he will probably never turn them above 30% because it's just too much light!

My initial experience with Chauvet Support was excellent. I had some issues with them locking on full and/or strobing at first, but a few emails and phone calls to Chauvet and we worked out that there were issues with power and DMX. Problem solved.

Finally the price can't be beat. Depending on how good of a relationship you have with your local dealer and how big of a package you are buying, you should be able to get them for under $2,000 each. I spent the last year searching the trade shows for just the right fixture and I don't think you can beat the combination of quality, features, and price right now. We cut our energy bill significantly. It's a little less heat for the HVAC to fight with and best of all I never have to change gel again.

My only complaint... The name is obnoxious. What happened to nice naming conventions like Colordash, ColoRado, Maverick, and Rogue? Instead it's the Ovation B-1965FC, Ovation B-565FC, and Ovation B-2805FC UGH.

So a big two thumbs up from Gaff on the Chauvet Ovation B-2805FC. Beutiful colors. Well Made. Good prices.
 
There's a method to the madness on the name.... B for Batten (E for "ERS", F for Fresnel, etc), 280 LEDs, 5 for Wash (our hard edge fixtures end in 0, washes in 5), so, B-1965 is a batten with 196 LEDs. Cut us some slack man...you know how hard it is to come up with names for all our fixtures?! Least favorite part of the job! At any rate, great review.
 
There's a method to the madness on the name.... B for Batten (E for "ERS", F for Fresnel, etc), 280 LEDs, 5 for Wash (our hard edge fixtures end in 0, washes in 5), so, B-1965 is a batten with 196 LEDs. Cut us some slack man...you know how hard it is to come up with names for all our fixtures?! Least favorite part of the job! At any rate, great review.
I figured it was something that makes sense in a catalog. But to the end user calling them Katherine, Marge, and Bertha might be more helpful. ;) Next time you need help with names give me a call! Ford's got my number!

Or try this.
 
There's a method to the madness on the name.... B for Batten (E for "ERS", F for Fresnel, etc), 280 LEDs, 5 for Wash (our hard edge fixtures end in 0, washes in 5), so, B-1965 is a batten with 196 LEDs. Cut us some slack man...you know how hard it is to come up with names for all our fixtures?! Least favorite part of the job! At any rate, great review.

Ok, now you peaked my interest, what do the C's stand for? Cyc for both of them? I bought nine of the C-640FC fixtures two summers ago now. Perhaps FC doesn't mean Fresnel Cyc? That 0 throws me off too because they are pretty diffused unless you don't count that built in diffuser plate.:excitable:

With that being said, those fixtures have been great for everyone who uses the space. I actually had to retrofit three shows into them when we got them. Before they arrived I did some reprogramming to make the transition quicker. Set the fixtures to 100% and each color to whatever value they were in the old show. After they arrived, I had to dial back the main intensity to 30% because they were too bright (18' trim height). Its a good problem to have. And the bright intensity of them has come in handy several times. They are great fixtures!
 
Ok, now you peaked my interest, what do the C's stand for? Cyc for both of them? I bought nine of the C-640FC fixtures two summers ago now. Perhaps FC doesn't mean Fresnel Cyc? That 0 throws me off too because they are pretty diffused unless you don't count that built in diffuser plate.:excitable:

C is indeed for Cyc. It's the first letter that denotes the fixture "style". The letters after the numbers are for the "type", FC for Full Color, WW for Warm White, CW for Cool White... The C-640FC, yeah, that was my fault...it should have been a "5" at the end, but, it was launched before I realized I screwed up....so, its out there as is.
 
The problem in our house is that the only lineset available to hang our top wash from is only 1 foot downstage of the cyc... and 1 foot down from that is our scrim, which we don't want to splash. How far down are yours hung?

Yeah, mine are about 4 feet downstage of the Cyc. @Jay Ashworth how tall is your cyc? How do you currently light it? How effective is it?

Oh @Ben Dickmann and @Ford... Have you guys at Chauvet experimented with extremely short throws? In order to fully and evenly wash the cyc from only 1 foot downstage?

1 foot seems like a nearly impossible job for any product
 
Have you considered something like half-hats to provide a little more control? That's what we use on our Desire D40s to keep the spill off the borders and legs that are upstage of the lights. They would likely help to keep spill off your cyc for a top wash, assuming your fixtures can accommodate such an accessory. With D40s they cause a little bit of color fringing but it's not noticeable in most situations.

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Have you considered something like half-hats to provide a little more control? That's what we use on our Desire D40s to keep the spill off the borders and legs that are upstage of the lights. They would likely help to keep spill off your cyc for a top wash, assuming your fixtures can accommodate such an accessory. With D40s they cause a little bit of color fringing but it's not noticeable in most situations.

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@Jay Ashworth that makes me think of the ETC Cyc attachment for the SourceFour LED. That might work well for you, not sure how wide it throws, but I remember them being very close to the drops in the trade show booths. Or perhaps The Altman spectra is the best bet. It's the closest to a traditional cyc light bucket converted to LED. Great for groundrows if that works for you.
 
Yeah, mine are about 4 feet downstage of the Cyc. @Jay Ashworth how tall is your cyc? How do you currently light it? How effective is it?

Our top is 2 rows of MR-16s, double-hung, on lineset 28, 22'4" upstage.

The cyc is 42x24ft, on lineset 30, 23'4" upstage.

We get a logarithmic wash, lost in the other lights at about 6' down.

Our black scrim is on lineset 27, 21'10" upstage. Yes, 6" downstage of the cyc wash.

When we run our single-row groundrow, further out (3-4'), we get about the same distance up the cyc.
 
Continuing the story of my cyc lights...

One of the fixtures went dead this week after a year and a half of use. We did have a wind storm go through town which may have messed with the power although everything else was fine. I tried a different power cable, a different fuse, and a different circuit. No luck, just dead. Called Chauvet Tech Support, the guy listened to me go through what I did for about 3 minutes and pronounced the power supply dead. He offered the option of sending the fixture in for repairs, but I don't really want to deal with shipping a 5 1/2' fixture anywhere, so he offered to just send me the power supply to swap it out myself. He transferred me to the parts guy who gave me an email address to send a copy of the receipt to and in less than 10 minutes the whole thing is taken care of. Nicely done Chauvet.
 
Continuing the story of my cyc lights...

One of the fixtures went dead this week after a year and a half of use. We did have a wind storm go through town which may have messed with the power although everything else was fine. I tried a different power cable, a different fuse, and a different circuit. No luck, just dead. Called Chauvet Tech Support, the guy listened to me go through what I did for about 3 minutes and pronounced the power supply dead. He offered the option of sending the fixture in for repairs, but I don't really want to deal with shipping a 5 1/2' fixture anywhere, so he offered to just send me the power supply to swap it out myself. He transferred me to the parts guy who gave me an email address to send a copy of the receipt to and in less than 10 minutes the whole thing is taken care of. Nicely done Chauvet.
@gafftaper Please update us when you receive your new power supply, let us know if it fully solves your problem, if all of your strips still match and if you have any further issues. Do you have to ship the original PS unit back?
Toodleoo!
Ron Hebbard
 
Chauvet sent me the power supply in about 5 days. I'm sure faster shipping options were available, but I wasn't in a rush. I opened it up and discovered the fixture actually has two power supplies so I had to trial and error replace one, then the other to figure out which one was the bad one. Still it was easy and only took about 15 minutes and I'm back up and running again. Thanks Chauvet!
 
@gafftaper Please update us when you receive your new power supply, let us know if it fully solves your problem, if all of your strips still match and if you have any further issues. Do you have to ship the original PS unit back?
The strips still match nicely and they didn't ask me to return the power supply. It was all quite painless and well handled.
 

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