Elektralite

DHSLXOP

Active Member
Hi everyone...

I was hoping someone could help me out with this. I was looking on stagelightingstore.com and I found the company elektralite. I've never really heard of them, so I was wondering if anyone has ever used them before and if so, can tell me a little bit about their products, especially, if they work well with dimmers. (Because the website says "it works dimmers too"--so in my mind, that means that it's mainly a moving light board) Thanks in advance to everyone!

Edit: I'm talking about their controllers, not their fixtures.
 
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Elektralite? Wow, Ummmmm Stumped me. I don't think I've ever heard of that one.
 
From what I've heard from a number of people their controllers are rather nice units for a small number of fixtures. If you don't need to control a very big rig, it might be what you need.

As an aside, their Paintcan fixtures have the worst CMY system available. The flags don't work well, and you can see gradation in color from one side of the spot to another.
 
Just took a look at thier website < thanks for the link> Thier fixtures look kinda like second run Martin 500's. I emailed a friend to get his opinion, as he knows a lot more than I do. Heck I'm a moron when it comes to newer boards, compared to most of the rest of you here < most :twisted: >. Sorry I'm not being helpful, I wasting time cause I don't want to go paint things. PLease let me stay here, I don't want to go ........ Crap they caught me goofing off again! :rolleyes:
 
From what I've heard from a number of people their controllers are rather nice units for a small number of fixtures. If you don't need to control a very big rig, it might be what you need.
As an aside, their Paintcan fixtures have the worst CMY system available. The flags don't work well, and you can see gradation in color from one side of the spot to another.


Thanks for the help. I'm glad you said something about the paintcan fixtures because I was looking at those and wondered how a CMY system could be as cheap as those were.
 
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.
 
Well, aren't those cute. They are the suck though from what I've read about them. Sad. Their boards are nice though.
 

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