So here it is,
I have about 1 1/2 months to select a new lighting
console. Our old
colortran is ready for the grave yard. I work in a 365 seat junior college
theatre. I want an
ETC because it has been the industry standard for the last 10+ years and I think it will continue to be so for awhile. So, I thought this would be easy. Then I find out that the expression
line is going away...what am I left with? I'm scared of the congo because I hear that if it breaks down...I would have to
send it halfway around the
globe to get it fixed (I live in TX). The AEO is so new...and I don't know if I can get a demo on it. Both of which I might have to get a new
dimmer rack for as well. Question, if you had to get a board from
ETC for a small college setting...what would you be looking at?
Heres the
lay down for how you might want to choose an
ETC Console
First of all how many dimmers do you have?
Second, Do you have any moving lights or multichannel scrollers?
then here is how it goes:
The
ETC Express Series starting with:
ETC Express 24-48: capable of controlling at most 96 channels on 48 channels, it can become a very crowded board when you are programming because the submasters (24 of them 10
page capacity) take up the bottom row of
channel faders and you only have 48
channel faders.
ETC Express 48-96: Capable of 192
channel capacity. 96 total
channel faders and 24 seperate
submaster faders. Good sized board for your theater if you do not need to control moving lights but like to have flexible patching
lay outs on
channel faders and 24 submasters (10
page memory so technically 240 subs).
ETC Express 72-144: Identical in
layout of submasters and
channel faders, except there are 144
channel faders on the board and I believe maximum number of controllable channels is 240.
ETC Express 125-250: same size board as
Express 24-48, Maximum controllable number of dimmers is 500(?) and it relies on only 24 submasters to control all of the channels (either 125 or 250)\
All of the above have a mximum
dimmer control of 1024 dimmers
If you need moving light capabilities but you are on a budget take a look at these two Expression family boards:
ETC Expression 3: has 24 submasters on 10 pages of memory, 6 moving light encoders and an option of
channel capacity from the following ranges 400/800/ or 1200 channels. The maximum number of controllable dimmers is 1024
ETC Insight 3: Has 108 dual capability faders (they can be either used as subs or
channel faders) and has a 10
page memory capacity. Again there are 6 moving light encoders on this board.
For all of the expression family boards above you may choose to run ETCs Emphasis
system on the board which allows for previsualization of the the show in
WYSIWYG console addition. The
channel capacities are set in these versions from any where between 2500 channels to 5000 channels.
Now if you have the money these two new boards are worth a look at:
ETC Congo: good board for moving lights but you need to learn a new programming syntax.
ETC EOS: This board is made to control moving lights scrollers and
conventional fixtures with
ease. there are two built in
LCD touch
screen monitors for encoders and other functions and two external
LCD monitors for Displays. There are 10 motorized faders with 24 pages of memory for storing submasters or other effects.