Automated Fixtures REVIEW: Chauvet Rogue R2 Spot

soundlight

Well-Known Member
I had about a week recently to demo the Chauvet Rogue R2 spot at my main place of employment. I was so impressed that I wanted to do a little write up on it here for CB folks. I'm pretty sure that this light will be known among co-workers as the light that I wouldn't shut up about. In light of that, we're probably going to be purchasing 18-24 of them for rental stock soon.

I'm usually that guy who will show up to the fixture demo with console personality and screwdrivers in hand, ready to make your fixture show me all of its flaws, so one person at work was joking that I almost went too easy on this one, or else it really is that good.

First of all, kudos to Chauvet for making a line (the Rogue line) that's not only ridiculously affordable but very feature-rich. If you're looking for movers to add to your space, check out the Rogue line.

The main question everyone wants to know after reading the spec sheet is "how bright is it?" Well, there are several ways to answer that. For one, it blew our older Studio Spot 575s out of the water. No contest, but that's what we were expecting. After confirming that, we did a lineup with a MAC700 Profile (700W arc source, 7500K), VL3500 Spot (1200W arc source, 6000K), and the Rogue R2 spot. The lamp in the MAC700 was brand new that day, the lamp in the VL3500 Spot was about a third or so in to its life. Also to be fair, the MAC700 and VL3500 have multi-lens zoom systems on them to cut down on output, while the R2 just has a fixed-angle 16.5 degree lens.

In white, the MAC700 looked about as bright (a little bit brighter than the R2 in the center due to hot spot, and definitely noticeably dimmer than the R2 on the edges, again due to hot spot). The VL3500 Spot was noticeably brighter in the center, and about the same intensity at the edges. The R2 had what I would call an almost perfectly flat field. Let me repeat that. The R2 had what I would call an almost perfectly flat field. One of the shop techs that walked by told me it had to be fake because no moving light could have that flat of a field.

With all 3 lights up, the R2 looked cooler yet at the same time pinker than the VL3500 or the MAC700. I suspect that this is due to the high green content of the discharge lamps, because without the other fixtures up next to it it looks very white, albeit with a high color temp.

Where it gets interesting is where we start putting colors in. With the VL3500 Spot and R2 Spot both with the dark orange color chip in and both fixtures pointed at the wall, they looked almost identical. Some of the production staff and salespeople stopped by, and none of them could believe what they were looking at. The VL3500 Spot had a slight edge over the R2, but it was only in the center where the hot spot was. One of the guys said "I didn't even think we'd be looking at this with anything close to a 1200W source." After all, it's "just" a 240W LED!

The MAC700 didn't have a color chip on the wheel that matched, and as expected when I mixed to an orange that was close, it was dimmer than the R2. Subtractive color mixing with saturated colors can really take the fight out of a light. We received a similar result with dark blue, which the R2's higher color temp helped out with, I'm sure. This thing blew away every single output expectation we had for it, that's for sure. Now to be fair, this is just to the naked eye up on a wall, but then again I think that's actually a pretty good test.

It's also LED, so that means that when you bring the fader down, it's off. When you shut it down, there's no lamp-off and cool-down sequence that you hope your students/volunteers/board-ops remember after you leave them to run your rig of movers. There's no heavy ballast, and no lamps to replace.

So we've covered output. Next up, color system. We've got 2 fixed color wheels here. Both capable of split colors, which Chauvet has included as defined points on the color channels rather than having to slowly scroll through on your encoder trying to find that point where the split between the colors is in the center. There are two CTO filters that really do look great. The full CTO filter is pretty fantastic, and looks more authentic than the CTO chip on the MAC700 or the variable CTO on the VL3500. There are also some color pairs that look great as split colors.

One thing that I did not like about the colors is that there are A) two very close pairs, and B) two glaring (in my opinion) gaps. First, the pairs: there are two medium dark blues and two oranges that are ridiculously close. No need to have two colors that close on a fixture with fixed wheels. Second, the gaps: no lavender, no amber, and no good way to mix either. Unfortunately, the color chips are glued in. I will say though that having two color wheels is pretty fantastic, and they're both pretty snappy. You can combine something like the slicing green-leaning yellow on wheel 1 with the full CTO on wheel 2 to get a nice, almost "canary" yellow. Plenty of other combos exist too, including combining the CTO with the light blue to get a nice yet warm steel blue color.

The gobo package on this light is something that is amazing. One rotating and one static gobo wheel, and unlike some other fixtures, I can actually layer gobos and iris and prism and make things look good. The gobos in the light are almost the same as a MAC700 gobo in size; in fact if you have custom gobos for a MAC700 there's a good chance they'll work. The measurements are very close. I was at first not in to the bar and triangle gobos on the rotating wheel, and then I started to layer them with the four excellent breakups (dots, triangles, natural, construction) on the static wheel. Good things happened.

While the static wheel is glued in, it does look like you could swap the gobos out if you were good with a razor and silicone adhesive and wanted to void your warranty. Which would be something I'd do if I owned some of these personally, because the one gobo that I don't like on the static wheel is the Trism from the Studio Spot 250 - not enough light out of that thing. Maybe a fat trism, or some other cool triangle pattern would be a good plan? The one gobo that surprised me on the static wheel was the "construction" gobo - it's from the Apollo catalog, I think, and it's great. It's asymmetrical, it's got some good diagonal stuff going on, and it works great with the prism and CTO. Killer for high side light, I think. And with the indexable prism, you can make it be wider closer and narrower further away.

Back to the bar & triangle gobos though, there are a lot of variations out there and maybe for the next version of this light - R2.2 Spot mayhap - they can come up with a unique bar and a unique triangle. Signature gobos are always a good thing to have in a light. The one gobo that I am far from sold on (but @Pie4Weebl says looks great in haze) is the stick man gobo. I've gotten some great responses to that, including "that's the weirdest gobo I've ever seen" and "that's creepy". Again, if I had the choice of replacing gobos for myself, I'd put the Apollo MS-1041 Crazy Blocks gobo in place of the stick men. On the other end of the spectrum though, the circle of ovals gobo is one of the absolute coolest gobos in haze. It's a killer look. It also makes the glad that the rotating gobos - and the prism - are completely indexable.

I suggested to Chauvet (@Ford in particular) that they come out with a theatrical gobo pack for this light, since I see a lot of schools and theaters being interested in it for being an affordable moving light. Yes, you can order whatever gobos you want, but I see something like the gobo pack as an easy and economical way to add one line-item to the PO and get a useful package of gobos. Maybe the Le Mis whirlpool (a la MAC700), a nice dust breakup (a la VL "dust" gobo), a nice cobblestone/pebble breakup, and a nice linear/water breakup. These would all be able to go in the rotating wheel.

Next up is the effects package. We've got a 3-facet prism that's great for a faux zoom as well as adding rotational motion to the static wheel gobos, an iris that is wicked fast, and a frost - which is on or off, not variable. The prism is indexable and rotatable, which could be very useful for tiling gobos on a stage. The iris has some very cool macros, including some that I haven't seen before. Very useful for quick iris effects when you don't have time to program them on the console. It also layers well with the gobos for really cool effects.

What sets this light apart from so many others is the frost. It's not something you often think about with spot fixtures, but frost - and the right hardness of frost - is especially useful for a light like this. You've got some fixtures on one end that barely frost at all, making you wish you could defocus more to widen the beam when frosted. On the other end, you've got some other lights, where the frost blows the light out beyond all recognition. In the middle, you've got this fixture, which has a very nice frost that would be able to provide a good wash. The frost is not variable - it's in or it's not. When it's in, you don't see any gobos or other beam effects. If they were to make the frost in the next iteration in to a dual-flag toothed frost system that was variable, that would be even more awesome.

The innards of the R2 are pretty beefy compared to what I would expect. Nice belts. The gobo size, as I mentioned above, is great. Way better than the actually-dime-size gobos that I've had to deal with on some other lights. The head cover fixes my main complaint with the Q-Spot line, specifically the 560. On those lights, the rubber gasket for the head cover was not attached to one side. On this unit the gasket does appear to be glued on. Or else it was shoved much tighter on to one side as to make it hard to remove. Either way, much better. I hated having that gasket flapping around when I opened the light. Hanging hardware is via a pair of omega brackets which Chauvet says will fit any Rogue, Legend, or Next series fixture which is great to hear. Omega brackets are the way to go.

Everyone I've shown it to is interested. One school wants to buy 6. Another local production co. already bought some for themselves after doing their own shootout, and another company that I work for occasionally 2 states over also just invested in them. In addition, a local theater already has 2 and another school bought 1 with the intention to buy more, and that's only the ones that I know about.

In short:

Pros:
Output, flat field, 2 color wheels, great gobo selection, full effects package, speed, price, LED.

Cons (notice how picky I have to get for these):
2 close color pairs, stick men gobo, non-variable frost.

Holy cannoli that was a long winded review. I hope it has proved useful to some of you.
 
So it sounds like you are saying that Chauvet actually DOES have an R&D team and that they DON'T make "crap". ;)

Nice review. Do you know a price?
 
Chauvet used to be a very low-end lighting company years ago. Over the last few years, they've moved from budget lights for DJs and bar bands to very solid mid-grade stuff seen all over. Their latest products on the Chauvet Professional side, however, put them above Elation in my opinion (don't even get me started on the dime-size gobos, laughable optical train, and unexplainable manufacturing tolerances of Platinum Spots), and almost even with Martin (I've knocked Martin down a peg after being bought by Harman which has really cut the level of their tech support, and yes I have experience to back that up). That bendy fog machine in the DJ line though is still something to stay away from, and some of the LED PARs in the DJ and Pro lines have some not great red hot spots in the center (not as bad as the Martin Rush Par 1 though, that thing looks like a red donut hole in a blue donut).

The MAP is $1900ish, but as always, talk with your Chauvet dealer about getting the best price you can given the number of fixtures you're buying.
 
Thanks for the review, it would be cool to see more stuff like this getting posted for those of us that don't get to play with all the cool new toys on a regular basis.
 
You want me to get wordy about more lights and such? I can definitely do that. Up next: whichever Rogue fixture our distributor gets for demo next.
 
Chauvet is making real lights that pros are buying and behringer is making a real console that pros are buying. Both are real products developed in house, not renamed OEM gear. China has caught up and will soon leap ahead.
 
Thanks for the write-up, it was very informative. I was looking into the Rogue a while ago and they look very interesting and I am glad they work well. The issue for me is that I got from theatre to event lighting a lot, I still need the zoom function so the Mac 700 still fits me better right now. The other concern I have with Chauvet and Elation stuff is if I need extra units for a show, it’s sometime hard to find rental houses that will carry those unit so I can rent extras beyond my stock. I really wish I could open one of these up and see what kind of LED the engine is.
 
In the interest of not throwing a sales pitch here (which I hate when MFG's do), I just wanted to thank you for the fair and even review of the fixture. For those coming to USITT, I have three of these and three of the companion Rogue R2 Wash in the rig that you can see.

If you (anyone) has any specific questions about how or why we did something on this or any of the Chauvet Pro fixtures, as always we are happy to talk about it as much as we can, just ask!

I had to laugh a little about the "Stickman" gobo...yeah, I'll take the heat for that one, I designed it. It's really cool in the air though, and if you prism it, and overlay several fixtures, it's a really unique break-up, we like to call it the "CSI Look".
 
Thanks for the write-up, it was very informative. ... The other concern I have with Chauvet and Elation stuff is if I need extra units for a show, it’s sometime hard to find rental houses that will carry those unit so I can rent extras beyond my stock.

Hey all,
As Ben pointed out, hopefully you will be able to get a close-up and personal view at USITT.

Also, for those of you interested in cross-rental opportunities, they are pretty widely available.
4Wall has one of the first major rental companies to add these into their rental inventory.

hope that helps,
-Ford
 
SO, since there's been a decent amount of interest, here and via PMs, here's the things that I can make reviews happen on pretty soon. I'll try to be a bit more scientific with them too, doing things like "here's beam size at x distance", &c.
-Martin Rush PAR 2 Zoom RGBW (sitting at my bench at work, just about got enough to do a review with this one, and it's not as positive as I wanted it to be - I requested a demo of the Chauvet COLORado Quad Zoom Tour line - the 1 or the 2 - and hopefully that will be more promising)
-Chauvet Rogue R2 Wash (upcoming install I'm working on)
-Chauvet COLORado 1 Quad Tour (upcoming install I'm working on)

The concern with needing additional units for shows is definitely a real one, but it's becoming less of an issue for certain lights, like the R2 Spot. As Ford mentioned, 4wall has them in rental stock (not sure which locations, I think that I saw that it was the 3 main east coast locations last I checked), and Kinetic Lighting out in Cali also has them. I know that one of the production companies I work for out in Ohio has them now, and I'm sure more people will get them.

The other thing is for wash fixtures, there are so many LED washlights with a similar featureset that it's not worth it to buy the cream of the crop. Just a few years ago, it was Robe, Martin, or GLP, or Clay Paky if you wanted to pony up the big bucks. Now, even ADJ has an LED wash that I'd consider appropriate for smaller theaters (though the Rogue washes are much better - with pcon in/out instead of IEC, and much more powerful LEDs). You could easily supplement a rig of R1 or R2 washes with MAC Auras from your local rental house, and the Rogue washes cost less and have more output per LED.

Also, semi off-topic, call your rental houses and tell them what you'd rent!! We rely on your feedback! When we're going to purchase new fixtures for our rental inventory, we ask around and see what people are interested in. Now, the company that I work for serves not only the greater Philly area but also the whole country depending on who wants what when, so we have a pretty large market to look at when picking what lights to buy. But if it's a smaller rental/production house that serves a more localized area, your opinion is even more important.

I want to keep the "knockoffs" vs. real products debate out of this thread, but there are definitely some things from Chauvet that I would consider "knockoffs". It's about physical product design and specifics of housings, vents, &c - copying another manufacturers' signature design language that they use on ALL of their lights of that range for just one light that is being copied. That I will hold against them. However, that is a HUGE MINORITY of their products.
 
I have used these at a venue or two, and they are quite bright. I was surprised by their output, its really pretty unexpected. The other features like color wheels instead of CMY, fixed beam angle, etc are lack-luster, but they are reasonable given the market and the price point.

I have used the R1 spot, and they are fine, but nothing to write home about, except maybe the price.

The R2 Wash looks very good. I have only used one, but from what I have seen It surprisingly makes the GLP impression(x4/x4s) look like Garbage, and I hope to compare it side by side to an aura as well.

I have been Burned by Chauvet A LOT in the past, but this product looks like it has actually had a real person developing it, rather than just a selection from ACME lighting or some other Chinese catalog(like the Q-wash 419z and the Legend 412 that were both unforgivable junk.)

I hope that the Rouge series actually holds up and performs well, it is shaping up to b that way, but time will tell. It seems like Chauvet is being more proactive in its customer service, and distancing itself from the utter trash that they used to pedal. This is a very good sign, and hopefully will bring us more good fixtures at reasonable prices.
Also the LED Lekos that Chauvet sells are excellent too.(really waiting for the 5600K version) I will write more in depth reviews when I use them a bit more and have some spare time.

You know the saying, "Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me." Some times I feel very ashamed; I hope that feeling changes with the next few products.
 
Hey, Soundlight,

What company in Ohio has some? I am in Dayton, and the specs on the R2 Wash look really nice. Looking to replace some arc washes in our college theatre, and it is hard not to be interested when looking at their price point. (2) R2 Washes for the same cost as an Aura? Hmmmmm. Thanks!
 
Here is an update. I have been using the R2 wash a lot. They have been really solid, the colors and zoom range are nice, and I have substituted them for auras many times and everyone has been satisfied.

This product is a Home Run.

If you are replacing 250 or 575w washes, don't hesitate, even for bigger washes, just get a Few extra.

Check Chauvets web page for dealers in your area.
 
I have tried out the RH1. It's a beast and is a great unit for concert beamage. Not a really flat field in spot mode so not really a theater fixture unless you're doing a rock musical and want that style. Definitely a good unit though.
 
The company I work for has 4 of these fixtures and they are ABSOLUTELY awesome. (love the road cashes too. They roll like super smooth!) They are super durable to. Two of them actually fell off of ten foot truss at an outdoor gig and hit the deck pretty hard- but they still work good as new!

I am looking into some R1 washes... has anybody used these before?
 
Just used R1 washes last weekend for a show in a 900 cap venue. First actual show I'd used them in. They are way more powerful than I expected. They just about kept up with 1K pars that I used them with, even in open white. In saturated colors they won hands down. Not surprising since Chauvet has packed 105 watts of LED in to that small fixture. And at the price - 100% sold. We have 16 of the R1 washes and 18 R2 spots where I work. Soon to be 30 R2 spots since we just ordered another dozen. They're really popular.

Here are some shots from the concert with the R1s. They're the 4 pairs of lights mid height in the upstage, had them on 10' and 8' pole & base with 2' threaded T-bars at the top. They were angled slightly down from straight up so I could hit the stage well. Other movers in the rig are MAC700 profiles, house provided. Fog in the last picture comes courtesy of (3) Chauvet Vesuvios. Sidelight (3 pars per side) comes courtesy of some crazy old Chauvet Tri38 Chrome cans. It was a hair metal band, so the chrome fit in perfectly! Chauvet folks, I have some nice high quality DSLR pictures from the night if your people want them.
R1wash_01.PNG R1wash_02.PNG R1wash_04.PNG R1wash_03.PNG
 
Just used R1 washes last weekend for a show in a 900 cap venue. First actual show I'd used them in. They are way more powerful than I expected. They just about kept up with 1K pars that I used them with, even in open white. In saturated colors they won hands down. Not surprising since Chauvet has packed 105 watts of LED in to that small fixture. And at the price - 100% sold. We have 16 of the R1 washes and 18 R2 spots where I work. Soon to be 30 R2 spots since we just ordered another dozen. They're really popular.

Here are some shots from the concert with the R1s. They're the 4 pairs of lights mid height in the upstage, had them on 10' and 8' pole & base with 2' threaded T-bars at the top. They were angled slightly down from straight up so I could hit the stage well. Other movers in the rig are MAC700 profiles, house provided. Fog in the last picture comes courtesy of (3) Chauvet Vesuvios. Sidelight (3 pars per side) comes courtesy of some crazy old Chauvet Tri38 Chrome cans. It was a hair metal band, so the chrome fit in perfectly! Chauvet folks, I have some nice high quality DSLR pictures from the night if your people want them.
View attachment 12689 View attachment 12690 View attachment 12691 View attachment 12692

SOUNDLIGHT,
Do you have any direct knowledge/use of the R1 spots? I used to use SS575 and would like something comparable. I see the R2 would be perfect according to your review, but I'm just wondering how close the R1 spots would be to the SS575? I'm mostly concerned with light output in general, not color or gobo options. Thank you!
 

Users who are viewing this thread

Back