Some random thoughts...
ETC has a golden customer service record.
Strand's old reputation is not the best. However, there have been a lot of changes at
Strand in the last few years. So far I've had
outstanding customer service. They've worked very hard to make things right. I'm convinced things are different. However, it's going to take a while to convince the whole community that things are different. There is one big exception: if it's a
Sunday Matinee and the curtain goes up in 20 minutes and your
console doesn't work.
ETC will answer the phone.
Strand will
call you back on Monday during business hours.
In the lighting world
ETC vs.
Strand is sort of like
Mac vs. PC. The larger group are
ETC guys. There is a smaller but very dedicated group of
Strand fans. In this industry you tend to get one shot. If a
system fails you in a show it'll be a long time until you give it a try again. We've got CB member Icewolf who is a big
Strand fan based on years of positive experience using their consoles. Derek had a Horizon
system crash on him a few years back and he's now highly skeptical of the Horizon software being used in the
Palette systems. I'm not saying that's good or bad... it's just a reality of the industry for you to understand as you are reading about the two products. Beware of people's biases. As a result, we've had some amazingly unproductive debates around here about who makes the best cheap gear. It seems that every product on the low end has a avid lover and bitter hater. Personally I've had great experiences with both
ETC and
Strand.
One thing left off Derek's chart above is the educational oportunity.
ETC has been #1 in the industry for a while. It's looking like they will continue their reign with
Ion and
Strand will be #2. This means if you are able to get an
Ion students will have the oportunity to learn lighting on a
console that they are more likely to see around the industry. That's a big plus even if you don't use many of it's capabilities.
Software wise, there is very little that
Ion can do that any of the
Palette consoles can't do (and vice versa). Both are just PC's that run software. If
Strand comes up with a cool feature that
ETC doesn't have, it can probably be added to the
ETC console in the next software update.
The big difference between Basic
Palette and
Ion is hardware differences like
encoder wheels and touch screens... but do you need those things? Can you afford the touch screens? Would your couple thousand be better spent on something else? The real negative side to the hardware differences for the Basic
Palette is that
Ion gives you buttons and
encoder wheels for just about everything. With the Basic
Palette things are buried in a series of soft keys or keyboard shortcuts. You will find yourself using a keyboard and
mouse a lot... with
Ion you'll be on the
console all the time. It's different... If you were programing a ton of intelligent gear you would hate it. But you aren't so it's probably not that big of a deal to you. You also get 1000 channels and multiple universes instead of 100 channels
in one universe... that's not a problem for you. If you need to upgrade down the
road you can upgrade the Basic
Palette to 512 channels. Being that it's a school you aren't likely to live to see the need for that upgrade... but it could happen.
You mentioned
Preset Palette and Sub
Palette. There really is very little need for a 2 scene
preset console in the modern lighting world (thus the reason
ETC stopped making them in their professional
line). Unless you are doing a lot of
busking you probably don't need a sub
palette. The price of Sub
Palette and
Preset Palette are both very close to the price of
Ion with one
wing panel... you have to buy the
wing panel or you won't have any subs. If you decide you need more subs... just buy another
wing panel. A cool expandability feature. I believe you can even install one
wing panel in a remote location to allow
submaster operation from different places in the theater.
