Let me just fire up my broken record here...
The new Robe
LED units - DLX and DLS - are amazing. Most people haven't adopted it yet because Robe is a mostly unknown brand in the US. They're just now starting to get people's attention with the Pointe. I personally have set up a Robe DLS side by side with a MAC700
Profile. I'd put the white brightness between a VL2500 Spot (MSR700/SA, the
dimmer of the two) and a MAC700
Profile (HTI700W/D4/75, the brighter of the two lights). I'd put the color brightness close to if not equal to that of a VL3000. If you go anywhere else in the world, Robe is a well-respected brand. Why they haven't gained that reputation in the US mostly comes down to poor efforts on their part, from what I understand. Their lights, from all accounts that I've heard, just don't break. Even their old 575s. They just don't break. They
build so many of the parts at their own facility so that they can quality control everything.
Another thing, not necessarily for specific discussion in this thread, but more generally: why are we putting subtractive mixing systems in front of white
LED chips? The GLP SpotOne and now the Robe DLS/DLX have done a phenomenal job of providing an
LED color mixing
system through a hard edged light. The quality and brightness of saturated colors is significantly better. One other major thing that I've already brought up and always will is that with a native RGBW color mixing
system in the back, you eliminate the need for several moving parts - those being the color mixing
system, the
bit that fails first on many moving lights that I've serviced. You don't have a
system of
dichroic glass flags or discs with the associated
system of motors, belts, gears, pulleys, glass blade tracks, limit switches, and motor drivers that are all failure points. You just have
LED drivers and LEDs, which in my experience (except in the B-EYE K20s, surprisingly - have had a few
LED driver boards go already, luckily they're easy to swap) have been miraculously stable. Also, unless the LEDs are on, the
unit isn't producing all of the heat (it's already way less heat than associated with an arc lamp of the same output) and the thermal
system can take a break, thereby bringing less dust in to the
unit.
With
LED units in general you also don't have the dimming problems that
Martin arc source fixtures fixtures -
specifically the Viper - exhibit when they're dimming, which is that the
strobe blades provide the dimming and it looks like crap at the low end. It's not something you'll see through
haze when the
unit is used as concert backlight/
deck units, but it's something you'll see when you do a 15 count fadeout in a theatrical show. I put a Viper Performance on a 20 second
fade last week and you could see the toothed
strobe flag coming in in the bottom 25%. Everyone was surprised, even the dude from
Martin who was showing it off.
Definitely get a demo of the DLS. You won't be disappointed.