UV LEDS for blacklight theater effect

[robmerow]

Hello,

Its been a long time since I've done a theatrical production requiring blacklight effect. Back then (about 10 years ago) I rented Wildfires becuase it was cheaper than anything comparable with LED at the time. Is this still the case? Anyone have experience with those dime-a-dozen UV LED pars that are all over amazon/ebay?

Thanks!

 

[JakeRhodesTech]

LED all they way for any modern Blacklight/UV effect. No warm up time, instant on, of and of course, strobe. However I would steer you away from the cheap amazon UV lights as those will more than likely just be "purple" than anything else. AKA there will be a lot more visible light being thrown than that of a true 365 Nanometre wavelength UV par, which will have little to no visible spectrum. There are a lot of manufacturers that make a true 365 Nanometres Blacklight, my 10cents take a look at Altman. They have anything from Cyc/wall wash fixtutes, generic wash pars and strip lights that are all true UV.

Blacklights Archives - Altman Lighting

Blacklights are high intensity discharge lighting fixtures which produce a wash of near ultraviolet light for effect. Ultraviolet light waves cause white reflective and specialty treated surfaces to flouresce while dark or absorptive surfaces become invisable.

www.altmanlighting.com

 

[almorton]

This is off topic but has to be said; get your units right. 365Nm is 365 Newton metres. 365 nm is 365 nanometres which (I'm sure) is what you meant.

 

[JakeRhodesTech]

This is off topic but has to be said; get your units right. 365Nm is 365 Newton metres. 365 nm is 365 nanometres which (I'm sure) is what you meant.

yep that's what I meant, thanks. fixed.

 

[Crisp image]

We recently used Chauvet Slimbank-uv18 units for a show. If you run them at about 50-60% the visible light is not bad but run them over that and the visible light is.....visible More units at lower power will do it nicely.

 

[gafftaper]

Yeah so it's a big budget question. True 366 nanometer led lights are UNBELIEVABLE... but they are expensive. If you have the budget that's what you want. I have some Apollo Avere UV fixtures that are nuts! It's true invisible UV. No light in the air just things glowing. If you can't afford that there are some good middle ground products in the DJ world. I would avoid the dirt cheap stuff on eBay.

 

[JimOC_1]

Crisp, ever wonder what 382 Congo Blue or 2009 Violet would do for middle of the road units?

 

[Crisp image]

Crisp, ever wonder what 382 Congo Blue or 2009 Violet would do for middle of the road units?

No. Not even though of it. As we don't do it often we just used what we could hire

 

[Ford]

We (Chauvet Pro) added a 365 nm Par to the Ovation line (Ovationp56UV). It's the only fixture that we have that has no visual output, as it also uses a Bandpass filter to prevent other wavelengths for transmitting. We added the Bandpass filters right behind the reflector after our initial launch, as we noticed that the UV was causing components in the fixture to fluoresce, and a small amount of visible light to be emitted.
The output is pretty incredible... but they are more expensive than our DJ UV or even our COLORDash Hex Pars.

EDIT- using a gel like a Congo over another LED unit will probably not give you what your looking for. LEDs are narrow-band emitters (meaning that they ONLY generate light at certain wavelengths), and Gel is a subtractive color media (meaning it doesn't add color, it pulls out what you don't want to see). So using a filter to pull out the non-UV won't add any UV energy below the visible spectrum.
-Ford

 

[DELO72]

>>we noticed that the UV was causing components in the fixture to fluoresce, and a small amount of visible light to be emitted.

How cool is that? I wouldn't have even thought of the possibility that internal components might fluoresce! Totally agree with everyone here that if you are looking for UV, you need a true 355-365nm light source (with the expensive LEDs). Otherwise you have a V light source (Violet, not Ultra-violet), and you basically have a purple light coming out that ALSO causes a little bit of fluorescing as a pleasant side-effect. The Cheap "UV fixtures" [sic] use 400-405 nm LEDs and is why they look purple and not invisible to the eye, as they are not really UV in any manner.