Elekralite is part of Group One Ltd. They are the US distributor for the British-made Pulsar
line of
LED fixtures; also, Blue Sky, MC2 Audio, Celestion & XTA audio products.
I recently had a Paintcan on demo for about six weeks. You get a lot for the money (around $900) - on-board electronic dimming,
CMY plus a color wheel, and 20-40 degree
zoom. They've just introduced a spot version called Paintspot.
Towards the end of the time I had the Paintcan, I got
Wybron Nexera
profile & Nexera
wash demo units & had a chance to do side-by-side comparisons. As you might expect, the
CMY color of the Nexeras blew the Elektralite away, with purer & more accurate colors. Still, I ended up buying a Paintcan, primarily to
wash voile panels.
Here are a few of the pros & cons...
Pro
(1) As already mentioned, built-in dimming,
zoom,
CMY & color wheel, low price.
(2) Light weight. It is about 20lbs.
(3) Available in black or white.
(4) Uses popular GLA/GLC lamps & comes with one pre-installed.
(5) It comes with a long (maybe 50ft)
DMX cable.
(6) Color changes can be quite fast.
(7) It can run
DMX, standalone with a few internal programs, or run in sound-activated mode.
Con
(1) As mentioned,
CMY color looks okay until compared with anything better.
(2) Although it does have an
LED display for setting
DMX,
etc., it is rather cryptic; this seems to be a problem with a lot of other units, though.
(3) The
yoke is about two inches too short. If you are shooting staight down, you'll have to
bend the cable 90 degrees coming of the of the
connector to get it underneath the
yoke.
(4) It comes with the shortest
safety cable I've ever seen.
(5) The
fresnel lens is attached only on one
point. I noticed that the Nexera does the same thing, although the mount for it seems to be made of stronger metal. Still, the opposite side of the
lens in both units just "
floats" within the housing. The Paintcan I bought had a bent
lens mounting bracket, so the
lens was sitting in the
fixture at about a 25 degree angle. I debated getting it replaced, but decided to open it up &
bend it back into place.
(6) The
yoke tilts
in one direction only; you can only get about 5-10 degrees in the other direction.
(7) Apparently, it no longer comes with a floor
base as pictured on the web site.
(8) The optional barndoors are interesting, but they are a pain to align for installation & the too-small knobs used to lock each door in place are just far enough inside the acccessory to be an aggravation for all but the smallest fingers.
(9) Elektralite has no photometric data available for the Paintcan (I called & asked).
(10) No
strobe function, although you can spin the color wheel rapidly in either direction. There are five colors and a closed position, so you'll spin through color then briefly go dark.
(11) Although listed as a 20-40 degree
zoom, it sure looks like a much smaller
zoom range to me, way less than 40 degrees.
There are a lot of other stationary color mixing fixtures out there, but none as inexpensive as the Paintcan. While the Nexeras are only about $300 more, you'll need to use a dimming
circuit, buy a
power supply & forgo motorized
zoom.
Once I got the Paintcan
lens back it place, the output did look better than the demo
unit (which I assume had been bounced around the country quite a
bit). It definately needed the lamp re-centered, but I didn't take time to do that. I returned the Nexeras before my puchased Paintcan came in, so I was unable to repeat the side-by-side tests. Having seen the color produced by the Nexeras, I'd say the Paintcan cannot match their color.
BTW, I was disappointed in the Nexera
wash fixture, too. The
manual zoom range seemed rather limited, and the
wash was no where near as even and lacked smoothly-diffused edges you'd find with an inexpensive
Altman 65Q. The
profile, however, was a different story! The 25-40 degree was very nice & with it slightly out of focus and a Hamburg
Frost gel , makes a pretty nice
wash work-a-like. It will certainly fall off at the edges a lot quicker than a 65Q, but you have the option of taking the
gel out & using it as a pofile with M-size gobos. Both the was &
profile seem well built and are heavy. The
profile has nice, thick shutters.