It's an interesting concept and all but there's a few things that I'd like to
point out that make me think that all is not lost for
LED technology in moving lights.
First, it has a 266W light source and luminous flux of 22,000, that's the exact same as all of the
Clay Paky 300W sources and I would guess close to the same as other major manufactures. One of the things that makes
LED so attractive is the low
power usage vs. light output ratio that they have.
To stick with electronics, they have a source that strikes. Striking a lamp has been the accepted norm for a wide variety of moving lights, but we're not talking about what we have we're talking about the future of lighting, That is what we want in our lights. Any light that doesn't have all the equipment solely for the purpose of striking the lamp will be IMHO lighter and easier to maintain. First of all it says semi-hot re-strike that is a red flag. Hot re-strike is a luxury that not all lights have, but saying semi-hot makes it sound more like a "it might work, it might not" kind of situation that is just filling lines on the company product propaganda. Furthermore and more generally nothing is more infuriating to me than working on a light that won't
strike. You can't use a
meter cause the
potential difference at time of
strike is 2000V+, it's instantaneous not consistent
power,
etc.... If you can remove that part of a light and still make it output a reasonable amount of light I am one of your new supporters.
Lastly it's a 10,000 hour expected lamp life. That's still more than a 10x the lamp life that I've been working with but it's still a lamp that's expected to burn out if you use the
fixture quite often (like on a touring show). 10,000 hours is 416 days and change, that's a long time, but the 100,000 hour life time of many LEDs is 11.7 years worth of time. Yes these are all projections and actual usage will make this number vary widely but the bottom
line is that if you buy this plasma
luminaire you're gonna have it in the back of you mind that some day, for some reason (burn out, mistreatment, poor cooling,
etc...) you're going to probably have to buy a new lamp for your
unit. If you buy an
LED fixture you buy it with the understanding that by the time you have LEDs burning out that
fixture will either be relics of a time long gone or an unusable fixtures for some other reason.
Like I said plasma moving lights overall sounds interesting (maybe something like a DL
luminaire that I'd actually recommend to someone) but I just don't think that it threatens to end the development on
LED moving lights.