I have also used both fixtures, but also never at the same time.
I do agree with everyone else that
CMY would be worth the extra money, if it could be found. But I understand that sometimes it's not there, and I think for what your objective is ( to give junior college students experience programming moving head fixtures) you're on the right
track.
For classroom use, I'd pick the Elation, and for show use, I'd pick the
Martin. For your theatrical productions, the 12 color positions on the
Martin are going to make you a lot happier than the 7 on the Elation, and i couldn't fine a brochure (admittedly, with only 5 minutes of googling) that specifically said that the elation dichroics can be swapped out... which the Martins can, so you can order new colors for the
Martin that will help it blend with what you commonly use for
theatre (L201, R04, R54, G841, whatever your designers like to use for pale tints....) It's no replacement for
CMY, but it will make the
fixture more useable. In the classroom, I prefer the Elation because subtlety isn't as important, and that 800 dollars could be spent on an two
Apollo scrollers, or two ellipscan moving mirrors, or 4
LED pars, or 4
Enttec Pro
DMX interfaces (so the students could program lights on their own computers with the
MagicQ software) or a small
hazer,
etc... anything that adds a new technology to learn to your moving lights lab (anything except s-4 juniors... which I'm at war against, but that's another topic.
) Plus you can teach
gobo morphing on the Elations, but not on the
MAC... which is a cool thing to include in their bag of tricks.
As we compare moving light
intensity, you really can't trust your eyes to tell you which light is brighter when they both have
no color in front of the lamp... because the manufacturers tint their reflectors to make the light look 'cooler' than it really is and thus more 'brilliant.' The demo I saw (which was of course, engineered by Varilite) took a
Mac 2000 and a VL2500 and showed that with
no color in, their intensities looked comparable, though not exactly identical. But if you put the same color in front of the light, the
Mac got perceptibly
dimmer, because the mirror is actually LOSING light to look brighter by reflecting with the blue tint. If your purpose is going to be zipping lights around in
no color to create a lot of motion
effect (like in an night club) then this cool tinted mirror thing is fine, but if you actually want to USE the light for
theatre, then you really need to do a little more investigation and compare the two lights side by side with gels,
etc. to see which is going to give you more light in the colors you will use, if that's one of your criteria for selecting lights.
Art Whaley
Art Whaley Design