ETC Lustr 2 LED over Conventionals

Alright so I've worked with the Lustr series 1 and 2. Our theater has about a dozen Lustr 1 and they work great for our side light and architectural walls/columns. I rent Lustr 2s when I get the chance because they're brighter than their predecessor. Now I have the chance to purchase new lights to completely replace our conventional S4 Ellipsoidals in the distant future. I love our 750W S4s and they're the best... Are the Lustr 2s even close to beating the good 'ol conventionals?? Even with the Tungsten HD and Daylight HD models??

We want to move into the LED realm for everything. We would literally replace all of our 100+ lights in the rig for LED front, down and specials.

What else is in the market aside from Lustrs that would work as downlight in replacing the S4 Par?

We've already made the decision to buy new LED moving lights from Robe replacing our old Mac 700s arc lamp profiles and wash.

I want to ask everyone if the LED fixtures are now at the point where we can move away from the HPL 575/750W lamps. We all have preferences, I love the ambient glow from these lamps but hate they draw so much power.

What are your thoughts??
 
I have moved from all S4 quartz to almost all ColorSource. Occasionally some S4LEDs. I'd say yes you can move away from quartz. Whether it is feasible budget wise from an existing installed quartz system is a harder choice. I'm pretty sure I'd add LED but keep a lit of quartz.
 
We replaced almost all our incandescent fixtures here between 2015 & 2016.
We have 50 S4 Series 2 Lustrs, replacing aged S4 750watt and Strand SL's. The Series 2 are definitely brighter than the Strand SL 600 watt, but not quite as bright as the 750 S4s.
We gained far more in functionality though, as any fixture can now be any colour. We can now have those fixtures able to change purpose, and effectively have more light in a colour covering the same area.
Example; a basic 3 colour front wash (blue pink, amber) of Left, Centre & Right, requiring 9 fixtures with Gels. If you have those same fixtures as LED (Series 2 Lustrs) they can all be blue, or all be pink or all be amber for those times when you want MORE LIGHT !

There has never been a time where I have wanted or needed to go back to incandescent for brightness, or creative requirements.
Any touring show Lighting designer who has come into the Theatre has been blown away with how good the light quality is, and how versatile the Source 4 Series 2 Lustrs are.
"I can't believe that is LED" is a very common phrase :)

For a PAR replacement I chose to go for Martin Rush PAR2 Zooms. All the punch and beam appearance of a PAR can, with colour & zoom capabilities.

As of yet, I have not yet found a suitable Fresnel replacement.... but I've not given up!
 
I'm not completely sold on the white quality of the ColorSource family, but it's hard to argue with the price.

LEDs are definitely here to stay, and can do almost any job that quartz can do. But Bill is dead on with budget questions. Throwing away functional equipment is not always wise!
 
Don't forget ETC has the Desire line of LED's and the ColorSource Par line. The Desire line has 3 fixture sizes D22, D40, D60 and 5 different LED array options.
They all have interchangeable lensing options to allow diffusion of light the way you need it.
In my experience the Desire line particularly the D60 Vivid's have enough punch to be similar as a Par64 in saturated colors.

Below is a link to a ETC's current Lighting Fixture brochure if you haven't seen it, it gives you a good look at what they have to offer.
https://www.etcconnect.com/WorkArea/DownloadAsset.aspx?id=10737481559
 
But do you every really run your 750's at full in N/C? I know I almost never do, except for special effects. The only time they get run at full is in saturated colors, because of the subtractive nature of gel. With LED, the opposite is true, LED is usually brighter than incandescent in saturated colors. So the variance in output is usually never noticed. In fact I can get brighter colors out of a Series 2 than I ever could out of a conventional 750w
 
We have replaced S4 PARS and PAR 64s in all three of our spaces with D60 fixtures. While our concert hall went with StudioHD types our two theatrical spaces are Vivids. We demoed the Lustrs and decided the color range did not meet our requirements. Without knowing what you are doing with them, what your throws are or if you rent out your facility I can just speak to our uses. Before we bought any wash lights we demoed a bunch. Our down throws tend to be over 22 feet, reaching 30 is not unusual. With these throws we found that the only fixture capable of matching a 575w lamped S4 PAR was the D60. In really saturated colors the D60 is brighter. When we have had contracted acts, two so far, come through we have found that one was stuck in the" I have to have conventionals" mindset and one was lowering her blue light levels in her cueing because they were too bright and loving them. Guest designers have been happy as well as the in house designers, myself included. If you have shorter throws there are more options.

Colorsource fixtures are good for what they are. We are halfway into switching over our concert hall front lights to CS Spots and are happy with them for that application. In our theatrical spaces we have two that we use with I-Cues as refocusable specials and they are fine for that to. Where I am not comfortable using them is as a primary foh or dance boom light. My lighting style mixes a pastel color pallet with some very saturated colors and the CS can't always get there. On a side note I just demoed a Ovation E-260WW IP fixture for a side job and was very impressed with it. It was every bit as bright as a S4 575w, 115v long life lamp, in a long throw situation and the color of my assistants tie die shirt popped better under it. If you are in a road house situation where gel is still a requirement, I could see using those.

Best advice I can give is to get as many of any fixture that can get your hands on and demo them, preferably at the same time and see what they do.
 
We're still using conventionals for front light but all other systems (tips, tops, cyc) were replaced a few years ago with D40s, either Vivid or Lustr+. We opted for D40s for the cyclorama instead of a linear array because the PAR form factor is more versatile for use elsewhere and it is nice to have control over the focus and lensing of each cell. We can do the cheesy vertical rainbow stripes, or get 2 or 3 horizon lines for naturalistic skies depending on the needs of the show.

Recently we added some used Clay Paky Alpha Profiles. I considered getting S4 LED2 fixtures but the used Alphas were actually cheaper and far more feature rich. Lamp replacement costs are about the same as scroller replacement costs they displaced. They should get us through the next 5 years as the LED luminaire market continues to evolve.
 
The Source4WD is marketed as a 575w drop in retrofit. To be honest, they're pretty bright for what they are. This is a nice option if you're just looking for a non-colormixing option.
 
The Source4WD is marketed as a 575w drop in retrofit. To be honest, they're pretty bright for what they are. This is a nice option if you're just looking for a non-colormixing option.
For the price difference between a source 4wrd and a colorsource... I'd probably make the jump.
 
Thank you for the feedback and thoughts on this!

A demo at our theater helps narrow down choice. The Selador Desire D60 and Lustr+ 2 Tungsten HD as well as Lustr+ 2 Color would be my choice to our inventory. With our dimmers, swapping the selected D20 modules for the 'Power Through TR20SAF' model would be ideal but I'd also conform to the R20 Relay type since we already have those for architectural. A budget wise choice by keeping most FOH and a few Down Light Pars as 750W works wonderfully by reducing half of our inventory from tungsten and completing the package with LED to match. That means the replaced stock of S4 Ellipsoidal and Par 750W can then be used for side light boom trees when it calls for it.
 
You're right the CEM3 is required for TR20! We have the CEM+ only. So yea it's either the D20's, R20's or CC20. The cost varies in each depending on who you buy it from. Kinetic is always our go-to vendor with reasonable prices.
 
We're in the process of being forcefully upgraded to full LED, and we've been given about 50k to do it. (As I'm pretty sure I've mentioned before)

We're currently eyeing the Chauvet Ovation lineup to replace our 750W Source Fours, coloured if possible and it's bright enough, or the e-260WW if we can't pay for that.
 
You're right the CEM3 is required for TR20! We have the CEM+ only. So yea it's either the D20's, R20's or CC20. The cost varies in each depending on who you buy it from. Kinetic is always our go-to vendor with reasonable prices.

Not to worry. The major advantage of the TR20 is that you can have one channel dim and one not. Since LEDs give you many fixtures on one circuit you will likely have circuits to spare. Hold onto a few D20s and you can swap them out in circuit pairs.
 
Correct I like that feature of the TR20 and even though it would be nice to upgrade to CEM3, for now it is a solid CEM+
I've budgeted for 90 total TR20's and we will be very happy to convert half of our space to LED. Keeping the spare D20s will come in handy whenever we need to swap. I had an ETC rep come in so I could also ask a few questions regarding network. Our system is NET 2. With points to plug in from FOH and Electrics using 1 and 2 port nodes. A single data run will daisy-chain at most 24 units, which is a mixture of moving lights, Desire 60s and Lustrs. What I feel undecided about is the DMX modes I'd want the moving lights and the Desire/Lustr....to operate under. With these new Robe DL7S and Spiider, they can be anywhere from 23 to 100 dmx channels. Which would eat up ALL 4 universes if I ran them at max. Even though I'd like to provide the most amount I just couldn't without upgrading hardware to higher universes. But it will be inevitable once we would like to use them at their full potential.
 
What console ?

As comment that I don't use the "Aura" feature on MAC Auras as the Ion is clunky to use 2 channels per fixture. It can be done, but requires some creative patching and as I mostly never have the need... thus my Auras are in basic mode.

Thus maybe think about the mode some of the fixtures will be in to whatever the console supports. That'll drive the decisions about DMX distro.
 
Keep an eye out on eBay for used Net2 nodes if you anticipate needing to add more universes in the near future. It's easy to stick in an unmanaged switch FOH to expand the number of nodes you can add in for relatively little money.
 
It is an ETC Ion with 2,048 channels in total. It has the latest software update 2.5.2 with most current fixture libraries.
The console supports all available modes from the manufacturer.. So the Spiider has up to 10 modes, DL7S has 4..
Until the ion adds point channels (or whatever ETC comes up with to do something similar) I would not suggest using the pixel modes on the spiiders, you're just asking for a mess. I do think that console manufacturers need to rethink how they license consoles, when $150 of led tape from china can max out a $10000+ console, something needs to change...
 

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