As for the "cheap" statements, I get it, but truly not every
venue enjoys the luxury of large budgets and we do the best we can with what we have to work with. For the price
point (under $2k), I think these fixtures are fantastic.
I am speaking here from my experience, so keeping in mind that Elektralite is still in business, I can't be right across the board. But I will say that the Elektralite fixtures that I have seen and those that I have heard of (3 people that I can remember right now have told me about how much their Elektralite fixtures don't get the job done) have not been a good deal given the price paid on repairs and issues had in normal use. I've also seen some errors and issues on Elektralite fixtures that no moving light should ever have. I'm not saying that Elektralite is across the board bad, but I really haven't heard much good about them.
In the future, if you end up purchasing any more moving lights, I'd say look at Elation - they have some good stuff at decent pricepoints, and in my experience and from people that I have spoken to (one of whom kept his 4 Design Spot 250s in a band's van without cases and toured with them and they worked fine) it stands up much better to a life of extended operation.
The
bulb had approx 1700 hrs of operation. Elektralite states 2000, but what have you guys seen in the field for average
bulb life?
I'd pull them closer to the 1500
mark, mainly because I don't like to see
color temperature deteriorate too much. One thing that I have seen with mover lamps of the MSD/MSR type that get left running too long is that the inner
envelope of the lamp begins to expand. I have seen a couple of lamps where the inner
envelope was almost touching the outer
envelope, which (especially if the
fixture was moving) would probably have ended with catastrophic death for the lamp. All of the lamps where I've seen this (and it's been quite a few now, usually in fixtures that people bring in for service) have been very low in color temp and rather dim for the kind of lamp that they are.
I lack experience with various brands of moving fixtures. Do all of the higher price/quality brands have an enclosure design that prevents the shards of glass from falling out of the fan port or is this something that is possible in almost all fixtures if the light is moving and flinging glass around in side the housing when it explodes. Please understand that these are genuine concerns and are not intended to be condescending. Thanks!
I have seen
wire mesh over the fans in a couple of fixtures, I have seen double-fin vents that catch broken glass in a number of fixtures, I have seen vents that bring air from the front of the
fixture to the back of the
fixture for cooling in a couple of fixtures, and I have see massive heatsinks with no exit points in other fixtures (fixtures that look like they have lateral "fins" in the back fall in to this
category). But I haven't seen many fixtures at all where the catastrophic failure of the lamp hasn't been taken in to account.
Many fixtures also have the UV glass positioned in front of the lamp housing so that the glass cannot exit in to the rest of the
fixture, but in some cases I have seen this shattered. For glass to exit a Studio Color or Studio Spot (575 series), it would have to get through all the bits and pieces of the assembly to the front of the
unit and fall out around the
lens. Hopefully the operator would be able to kill the
fixture in the significant amount of time that this would take. If the
fixture was not moving, there's very little chance of this happening.
Try chauvet
LED moving heads.
I don't know if the OP would be able to use a
fixture that was around the output of a 250w
halogen lamp, but I will say that none of them come anywhere close to the output of an MSD250. For that you need at least a 90
watt LED engine from a respectable manufacturer, like Lumileds, CREE or even
Edison. (EDIT: I should clarify that I'm talking about the moving head "spot" fixtures here, that is the fixtures that are hard-edge and can project gobos. Chauvet, ADJ and Elation have moving head
wash fixtures that could challenge or in some cases surpoass an MSD 250, but the OP here is talking about a spot
fixture).
