IanJ
Member
This is a summary I just wrote for my journal, but I figured CB folks would also find my observations useful. My journal is read by folks who have no clue about theatrical matters, so please pardon any too-basic explanations. Feel free to ask follow-up questions here, I'll answer them as best I can.
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As some of you may know, I'm technical director at Annex Theatre, a small fringe theater in Seattle. We have an opportunity to upgrade some of our equipment, and after our experience with LED instruments as part of Her Mother Was Imagination last year, I was excited to get some LEDs in.
I contacted PNTA, our local theater supply house, and arranged the loan of some instruments to evaluate in our space. It's all fine and good to look at specs on paper, but there's nothing like actually seeing the output in your own space.
For this evaluation, we ended up with five different LED instruments in the sub-$600 price range. (The rented LEDs from HMWI were about $1500 each, and there are LED instruments extending into many thousands of dollars each, so under $600 is definitely on the low end of things.) We had two from Omni Sistem: a PAR56 and a PAR64. We had three from Elation: an Opti RGB, an Opti Tri Par, and an ELED Par RGB Zoom.
It will help to understand the theater we work in, as it very tightly constrains what we want in a lighting instrument. The mainstage space is about 75 feet long, and about 25 feet wide. The back 40 feet (or so) make up the audience seating and the booth. The stage is about 25 by 25 feet square, with about a 6 foot backstage area that's given over to tool and fastener storage, with a comparatively narrow walkway. Our ceiling (this is the killer) is only about 9 feet from the stage surface to the grid pipes. The stage is slightly raised, perhaps 8 inches off the floor.
We only have about 100A for the whole theater, mainstage, lounge, greenroom, office and all. The stage's lighting circuits are on a 50A breaker. This puts a very real cap on our ability to light up the stage. We are using 7 SmartBar dimmer bars, for 28 channels, and part of an ancient EDI dimmer pack for another 5 channels. We are very excited about anything we can do that will make light without taking up power or dimmer channels. Enter LEDs.
The first LED instruments we tested were the two from Omni. The PAR56 is the size of a 6" fresnel, more or less, has a nominal 24W power output, and costs about $200. The PAR64 is longer, about the size of an Altman 6x9, putting out a nominal 36W, and costing about $250. Both use 10mm LEDs instead of the much higher-output Cree or Luxeon emitters. Both have individual red, green and blue LEDs (the only instrument to use all-in-one RGB emitters is the Elation Opti Tri).
The Omnis, from first impression onward, exuded a cheap, made-in-China feel. The boxes were printed in that gaudy, low-effort graphical style which seems to exemplify cheap Chinese construction. (I should emphasize that I have nothing against things that are made in China, it's the cheap part I'm complaining about.) Upon pulling the instruments out of their boxes, they are very light, and feel like it would only take the smallest drop to bend or dent the housing. They were plainly not suitable instruments for a working theater, but we put them up anyway to take a look.
The PAR64, upon being powered, immediately started whirring -- a surprisingly loud fan operated at all times. The PAR56 was silent. There wasn't a lot of difference between their outputs, with the color casts being noticeably different with all the sliders at 100. However, we're not interested in LEDs for white light (something they universally suck at until you add white and/or amber LEDs, which immediately tacks $1000 onto the price, at the moment). They both provided good saturated color. The beam angle was relatively narrow for our uses, maybe 35 degrees. Beam shape was erratic, as you would expect from a mass of 10mm LEDs which are aimed based on how their leads were bent during installation. There wasn't a substantial difference between the beams in terms of light intensity. Both instruments used such a slow PWM speed to produce a dimming effect that at low levels, they were more like strobe lights than anything else, producing visible and distracting stop-motion effects on any motion of any speed.
The DMX addresses of these two instruments are set by DIP switches. The bit values are helpfully printed next to (or at least in the proximity of) the switches. We actually received three instruments (two 56s and one 64) to demo, and were only able to put two up because one of the 56 yokes wouldn't take a C-clamp bolt, the hole being about 1/32" too small. Both models used 3-pin DMX cables. I ripped out the screws on one of the DMX out ports by plugging in the cable, pushing the connector into the body of the instrument. The ports were helpfully labelled DMX IN and DMX OUT, although on at least one of the instruments, the labels were swapped around, so that the IN port was labelled OUT and vice versa.
For our purposes, the Omnis were clearly insufficient. The beam angle was too narrow and too irregular, the construction far too light, and the always-on fan of the PAR64 was unacceptable. The quality control was obviously quite irregular as well. I wouldn't recommend these to anyone -- save your money and wait until they get cheaper, or get fewer of a better quality instrument.
The Elations were more our speed, and it was with real anticipation that I set them up. One of the Elations weighed more than all three Omnis combined. Each instrument was made with a heavy cast aluminum body (including an inbuilt safety cable anchor point on at least two of them), and was clearly much higher quality. They look similar to a Source4 Par except for the lens, with similarly finned bodies. Interestingly the yokes on each instrument were different -- the Opti RGB and Opti Tri had fold-out secondary yokes (presumably for floor-standing installation), and the ELED Zoom had a more standard yoke. The Opti RGB had a very shallow yoke, while the other two had unnecessarily tall yokes.
The Opti RGB, at about $300, is the low end of these three instruments. Its DMX channel is set by DIP switch (with no helpful labels showing bit values), with the 10th switch apparently acting as a DMX enable. With switch 10 off, the other 9 set DMX channel. With switch 10 on, the other nine are used to set the instrument into different modes. The manuals of all three instruments were definite low-points: poorly translated, and too vague, with wordy descriptions where succinct diagrams or tables would have been far more welcome.
The Opti RGB claims to have a 25° beam, which sounds about right. It was very tight, with a tiny clustered hotspot, and a very wide, nearly 180° spill that was a minute fraction of the hotspot's intensity, but was also clearly not just "black." The beam pattern was somewhat lumpy and uneven, like the Omnis. In our space, it lost out on beam size alone -- it would never make a good wash, and isn't really a good choice for a spot. Construction quality was fine. The LEDs were clearly using off-the-shelf molded glass or plastic lenses. It used 3-pin DMX connectors. It had fingers for holding a gel frame (something the Omnis lacked), and even came with a standard-size 6" fresnel type gel frame in the box.
The ELED Zoom is a very interesting instrument, and I was prepared to have it be my favorite. It includes the ability to control a 10°-60° beam width via DMX, along with the standard red, green, blue, color macros, strobe speed, and master dimmer. It is capable of defining a surprising number of channels. I have forgotten exactly how many (it's in the manual, which is available from the Elation site), but it ranged from something like 1 to 7 DMX channels, taking you from color macros (pre-defined colors depending on DMX level, which were clearly called out in the manual) only, to full control. It's also the most powerful of all the instruments we demoed, at a nominal 72 watts of LED power.
The ELED's various modes are set up via four buttons on the back of the instrument, and a four-digit LED display. The modes are entirely incomprehensible without the manual, and honestly are somewhat incomprehensible even with the manual. However, setting it up for DMX was easily accomplished, and it was delightful to see the DMX channel spelled out in decimal numbers rather than having to translate decimal to binary for DIP switches. Setting the address is accomplished by pressing an UP or DOWN button, and they scroll very quickly when held down -- a good thing, as with 7 channels per instrument, the last LED in the chain is going to be a goodly distance from the first one in channel count.
The beam pattern of the ELED Zoom was a bit surprising. I'm used to LEDs having a hotspot which then feathers more or less smoothly to a wide spill. This instrument had a very distinct, hard edge to its beam, much more like a focused ellipsoidal than a fresnel. There was some spill about 180° from the instrument, apparently leaking out to the side of the emitters, but the area between that spill and the beam edge was pretty dark. As the beam zoomed out to its widest, it gained a very noticeable bright ring around the beam, with smooth, even coverage through the middle of the beam. No hotspot to speak of.
The zoom feature is fun to play with. It takes a bit over a second to go from one extreme to the other (although I didn't time it, that's just an impression). The zoom is effected by moving the emitters inside the body of the instrument -- back and forth, closer and further from the lens board, which is fixed.
I found myself wishing for a moving mirror as part of the instrument. Having zoom by itself is not actually much of a selling point, at least for what we do. Once the novelty of the zoom feature wore off, the instrument's failings (for our purposes, I must stress) were clear: hard beam edge, gee-whiz but useless zoom feature, and a $200 premium over the one we really liked.
That would be the Opti Tri Par. This is clearly the newest design among all that we tried, and I encourage Elation to keep going in this vein. Among the features that set it apart from the others:
I was able to use one of the stand-alone modes to view the beam, and we were very pleased with the pattern. It has a very wide hotspot, feathering beautifully to nothing, like an ideal fresnel. The beam is perhaps 50°-60°. Perfect for washes in our small space.
An interesting and unexpectedly nice side-effect of each emitter being an RGB LED was that shadows didn't have the half-tone fringing effect I've come to expect from LEDs -- they weren't sharp shadows, but they also didn't include different colors in the fade-off into shadow. When you have distinct emitters of each color, shadows look weirdly technicolor or half-toned, because a given emitter is shadowed, while the one next to it isn't, resulting in a multicolored fringe around shadows.
We tried putting a barndoor on the Opti Tri Par, and were underwhelmed with the result. Possibly it would work better with a snoot to put the barndoor edges further out, but controlling spill isn't a strong suit of LED instruments, due to the wide emitting surface.
The Tri had a bewildering array of modes, most of which aren't useful to a theater. The manual was just as useless as the other Elations. Fortunately, setting it into DMX mode is clear enough, and the different channel modes are understandable from the manual. Interestingly, the Opti Tri Par we demoed had a 5-pin DMX connector, and I'm hopeful that this is an optional extra. We'd much rather use 3-pin connectors, so we can hook these instruments up with microphone cable instead of the comparatively expensive dedicated DMX cable.
It's very nice to have settled on an instrument that will be useful, and doesn't break the bank. I'm disappointed at the ELED Zoom, but probably only because I had unreasonable expectations for it. I'm surprised at the significant difference between the $300 Opti RGB and the $400 Opti Tri Par -- the Tri is clearly a newer generation, and offers a huge improvement in quality for a fairly small difference in price. (Correction: the Opti Tri Par is actually $500 -- not so surprised at the difference in tech now that I see the real prices.) The Tri is even better than the $1500 instruments we rented last summer in some significant ways, and for less than a third the price.
Note that the prices I've quoted are from PNTA, and are approximate. I'm sure you can find these instruments for cheaper online, but I encourage you to shop with your local theatrical supply store -- if you don't shop there, it may not be there next time you really need it.
------
As some of you may know, I'm technical director at Annex Theatre, a small fringe theater in Seattle. We have an opportunity to upgrade some of our equipment, and after our experience with LED instruments as part of Her Mother Was Imagination last year, I was excited to get some LEDs in.
I contacted PNTA, our local theater supply house, and arranged the loan of some instruments to evaluate in our space. It's all fine and good to look at specs on paper, but there's nothing like actually seeing the output in your own space.
For this evaluation, we ended up with five different LED instruments in the sub-$600 price range. (The rented LEDs from HMWI were about $1500 each, and there are LED instruments extending into many thousands of dollars each, so under $600 is definitely on the low end of things.) We had two from Omni Sistem: a PAR56 and a PAR64. We had three from Elation: an Opti RGB, an Opti Tri Par, and an ELED Par RGB Zoom.
It will help to understand the theater we work in, as it very tightly constrains what we want in a lighting instrument. The mainstage space is about 75 feet long, and about 25 feet wide. The back 40 feet (or so) make up the audience seating and the booth. The stage is about 25 by 25 feet square, with about a 6 foot backstage area that's given over to tool and fastener storage, with a comparatively narrow walkway. Our ceiling (this is the killer) is only about 9 feet from the stage surface to the grid pipes. The stage is slightly raised, perhaps 8 inches off the floor.
We only have about 100A for the whole theater, mainstage, lounge, greenroom, office and all. The stage's lighting circuits are on a 50A breaker. This puts a very real cap on our ability to light up the stage. We are using 7 SmartBar dimmer bars, for 28 channels, and part of an ancient EDI dimmer pack for another 5 channels. We are very excited about anything we can do that will make light without taking up power or dimmer channels. Enter LEDs.
The first LED instruments we tested were the two from Omni. The PAR56 is the size of a 6" fresnel, more or less, has a nominal 24W power output, and costs about $200. The PAR64 is longer, about the size of an Altman 6x9, putting out a nominal 36W, and costing about $250. Both use 10mm LEDs instead of the much higher-output Cree or Luxeon emitters. Both have individual red, green and blue LEDs (the only instrument to use all-in-one RGB emitters is the Elation Opti Tri).
The Omnis, from first impression onward, exuded a cheap, made-in-China feel. The boxes were printed in that gaudy, low-effort graphical style which seems to exemplify cheap Chinese construction. (I should emphasize that I have nothing against things that are made in China, it's the cheap part I'm complaining about.) Upon pulling the instruments out of their boxes, they are very light, and feel like it would only take the smallest drop to bend or dent the housing. They were plainly not suitable instruments for a working theater, but we put them up anyway to take a look.
The PAR64, upon being powered, immediately started whirring -- a surprisingly loud fan operated at all times. The PAR56 was silent. There wasn't a lot of difference between their outputs, with the color casts being noticeably different with all the sliders at 100. However, we're not interested in LEDs for white light (something they universally suck at until you add white and/or amber LEDs, which immediately tacks $1000 onto the price, at the moment). They both provided good saturated color. The beam angle was relatively narrow for our uses, maybe 35 degrees. Beam shape was erratic, as you would expect from a mass of 10mm LEDs which are aimed based on how their leads were bent during installation. There wasn't a substantial difference between the beams in terms of light intensity. Both instruments used such a slow PWM speed to produce a dimming effect that at low levels, they were more like strobe lights than anything else, producing visible and distracting stop-motion effects on any motion of any speed.
The DMX addresses of these two instruments are set by DIP switches. The bit values are helpfully printed next to (or at least in the proximity of) the switches. We actually received three instruments (two 56s and one 64) to demo, and were only able to put two up because one of the 56 yokes wouldn't take a C-clamp bolt, the hole being about 1/32" too small. Both models used 3-pin DMX cables. I ripped out the screws on one of the DMX out ports by plugging in the cable, pushing the connector into the body of the instrument. The ports were helpfully labelled DMX IN and DMX OUT, although on at least one of the instruments, the labels were swapped around, so that the IN port was labelled OUT and vice versa.
For our purposes, the Omnis were clearly insufficient. The beam angle was too narrow and too irregular, the construction far too light, and the always-on fan of the PAR64 was unacceptable. The quality control was obviously quite irregular as well. I wouldn't recommend these to anyone -- save your money and wait until they get cheaper, or get fewer of a better quality instrument.
The Elations were more our speed, and it was with real anticipation that I set them up. One of the Elations weighed more than all three Omnis combined. Each instrument was made with a heavy cast aluminum body (including an inbuilt safety cable anchor point on at least two of them), and was clearly much higher quality. They look similar to a Source4 Par except for the lens, with similarly finned bodies. Interestingly the yokes on each instrument were different -- the Opti RGB and Opti Tri had fold-out secondary yokes (presumably for floor-standing installation), and the ELED Zoom had a more standard yoke. The Opti RGB had a very shallow yoke, while the other two had unnecessarily tall yokes.
The Opti RGB, at about $300, is the low end of these three instruments. Its DMX channel is set by DIP switch (with no helpful labels showing bit values), with the 10th switch apparently acting as a DMX enable. With switch 10 off, the other 9 set DMX channel. With switch 10 on, the other nine are used to set the instrument into different modes. The manuals of all three instruments were definite low-points: poorly translated, and too vague, with wordy descriptions where succinct diagrams or tables would have been far more welcome.
The Opti RGB claims to have a 25° beam, which sounds about right. It was very tight, with a tiny clustered hotspot, and a very wide, nearly 180° spill that was a minute fraction of the hotspot's intensity, but was also clearly not just "black." The beam pattern was somewhat lumpy and uneven, like the Omnis. In our space, it lost out on beam size alone -- it would never make a good wash, and isn't really a good choice for a spot. Construction quality was fine. The LEDs were clearly using off-the-shelf molded glass or plastic lenses. It used 3-pin DMX connectors. It had fingers for holding a gel frame (something the Omnis lacked), and even came with a standard-size 6" fresnel type gel frame in the box.
The ELED Zoom is a very interesting instrument, and I was prepared to have it be my favorite. It includes the ability to control a 10°-60° beam width via DMX, along with the standard red, green, blue, color macros, strobe speed, and master dimmer. It is capable of defining a surprising number of channels. I have forgotten exactly how many (it's in the manual, which is available from the Elation site), but it ranged from something like 1 to 7 DMX channels, taking you from color macros (pre-defined colors depending on DMX level, which were clearly called out in the manual) only, to full control. It's also the most powerful of all the instruments we demoed, at a nominal 72 watts of LED power.
The ELED's various modes are set up via four buttons on the back of the instrument, and a four-digit LED display. The modes are entirely incomprehensible without the manual, and honestly are somewhat incomprehensible even with the manual. However, setting it up for DMX was easily accomplished, and it was delightful to see the DMX channel spelled out in decimal numbers rather than having to translate decimal to binary for DIP switches. Setting the address is accomplished by pressing an UP or DOWN button, and they scroll very quickly when held down -- a good thing, as with 7 channels per instrument, the last LED in the chain is going to be a goodly distance from the first one in channel count.
The beam pattern of the ELED Zoom was a bit surprising. I'm used to LEDs having a hotspot which then feathers more or less smoothly to a wide spill. This instrument had a very distinct, hard edge to its beam, much more like a focused ellipsoidal than a fresnel. There was some spill about 180° from the instrument, apparently leaking out to the side of the emitters, but the area between that spill and the beam edge was pretty dark. As the beam zoomed out to its widest, it gained a very noticeable bright ring around the beam, with smooth, even coverage through the middle of the beam. No hotspot to speak of.
The zoom feature is fun to play with. It takes a bit over a second to go from one extreme to the other (although I didn't time it, that's just an impression). The zoom is effected by moving the emitters inside the body of the instrument -- back and forth, closer and further from the lens board, which is fixed.
I found myself wishing for a moving mirror as part of the instrument. Having zoom by itself is not actually much of a selling point, at least for what we do. Once the novelty of the zoom feature wore off, the instrument's failings (for our purposes, I must stress) were clear: hard beam edge, gee-whiz but useless zoom feature, and a $200 premium over the one we really liked.
That would be the Opti Tri Par. This is clearly the newest design among all that we tried, and I encourage Elation to keep going in this vein. Among the features that set it apart from the others:
- RGB in each emitter, rather than a smattering of red LED, a smattering of green, and a smattering of blue
- Detachable power cable, using a locking IEC cord (IEC cords are the ones you have a big pile of in the closet if you own computers)
- The greatest variety of channel modes
- A mode to shut off the LED display on back after 10 seconds, so you don't have a zillion glowing red numbers in your grid
I was able to use one of the stand-alone modes to view the beam, and we were very pleased with the pattern. It has a very wide hotspot, feathering beautifully to nothing, like an ideal fresnel. The beam is perhaps 50°-60°. Perfect for washes in our small space.
An interesting and unexpectedly nice side-effect of each emitter being an RGB LED was that shadows didn't have the half-tone fringing effect I've come to expect from LEDs -- they weren't sharp shadows, but they also didn't include different colors in the fade-off into shadow. When you have distinct emitters of each color, shadows look weirdly technicolor or half-toned, because a given emitter is shadowed, while the one next to it isn't, resulting in a multicolored fringe around shadows.
We tried putting a barndoor on the Opti Tri Par, and were underwhelmed with the result. Possibly it would work better with a snoot to put the barndoor edges further out, but controlling spill isn't a strong suit of LED instruments, due to the wide emitting surface.
The Tri had a bewildering array of modes, most of which aren't useful to a theater. The manual was just as useless as the other Elations. Fortunately, setting it into DMX mode is clear enough, and the different channel modes are understandable from the manual. Interestingly, the Opti Tri Par we demoed had a 5-pin DMX connector, and I'm hopeful that this is an optional extra. We'd much rather use 3-pin connectors, so we can hook these instruments up with microphone cable instead of the comparatively expensive dedicated DMX cable.
It's very nice to have settled on an instrument that will be useful, and doesn't break the bank. I'm disappointed at the ELED Zoom, but probably only because I had unreasonable expectations for it. I'm surprised at the significant difference between the $300 Opti RGB and the $400 Opti Tri Par -- the Tri is clearly a newer generation, and offers a huge improvement in quality for a fairly small difference in price. (Correction: the Opti Tri Par is actually $500 -- not so surprised at the difference in tech now that I see the real prices.) The Tri is even better than the $1500 instruments we rented last summer in some significant ways, and for less than a third the price.
Note that the prices I've quoted are from PNTA, and are approximate. I'm sure you can find these instruments for cheaper online, but I encourage you to shop with your local theatrical supply store -- if you don't shop there, it may not be there next time you really need it.
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