The Patchman was quite good.
And for a very short time, between the original Strand-Century
Light Palette and the
ETC Obsession I, the Prestige 1000/2000/3000s were the best consoles in the industry.
Hmm, I guess I disagree. The Prestige Series stole about a year and a half of my life that I can never recover, trying to get it to work in rental at PA. Based on that root- canal, my observations:
1. The Prestige software totally failed to accurately copy the
Light Palette functionality that it was intended to target. Key items like multi-part cues were total train wrecks.
2. The hardware was fairly unreliable, due to the interconnect hacks that were required to stuff a standard motherboard and LARGE video card into a low
profile enclosure.
3. The Prestige Consoles were virtually unserviceable due to the density of boards stuffed into the low
profile enclosure. A full backup 3000 took hours to disassemble and reassemble.
After a year and a half of agony, we packed up our entire inventory of Prestige consoles and shipped them back to the factory. This disaster
console functionally ended the long relationship between Production Arts and
Colortran. And, we broke our shovel with a lot of top New York designers and installation sites who tried to use it. It took a while to recover, and the
ETC Expression took over the slot vacated by Prestige in our rental inventory.
ST