I put my new Blizzard Q12A RGBA PAR wash up against the lights I own and am most familiar with. I’m not a lighting expert and this is the first LED par that I’ve tried, so I don’t have a lot of experience of similar fixtures, but I use incandescent lights that a lot of quasi-budget conscious users have.
I, like everyone else, want all of the advantages of LEDs – low power draw, color changing abilities and not cooking the performers. I’m hoping to avoid the pitfalls of low brightness, poor beam characteristics, poor diming, etc. The Blizzrd Q12A caught my eye because it’s an RGBA fixture with approximately 10,000 lux in an attractive format for less than $300.
Here is a picture of my test setup:
The competition was a 150w PAR 38, a 500w PAR 64, and a Strand 26 degree 575w leko. The Strand is roughly comparable to an ETC Source 4 with a 575w halogen bulb, at least for brightness purposes. I didn’t have a 26 degree Source 4 or I would have used that instead. The camera was set to manual exposure - all pictures except the test setup picture are the same exposure settings.
Here’s the Strand 575w against the red channel of the Blizzard. Strand is on the left, Blizzard on the right.
Same light with green gel against the Blizzard
And blue
The 500W PAR 64 against the Blizzard
The PAR 38-150
The best 3000K-ish white I can get out of the Blizzard (100%R, 100%G, 75%B, 100%A) – note the color blotches in the beam
Strand ungelled against the Blizzard all 4 channels 100%
Strand red against Blizzard all 4 channels 100%
It’s clear that the Blizzard out-classes the gelled 150W PAR38 and the gelled 500W PAR64. Depending on the particular gel, it appears the Blizzard and the gelled 575w Strand are about equal. Ungelled, the Strand is 4 times the brightness, and the white is better.
The Blizzard’s beam is very even with no hotspots for the whole field, which does appear to match the spec of ~20 degrees. With multiple channels on, the different elements of the LEDs hit the lenses slightly differently, leading to a little blotching. That may or may not be a problem depending what you’re illuminating - stage scenery won’t show it, but some architectural applications may show it a little. The amount of blotching is dependent on the relative levels of multiple channels – colors closer to just one channel have less blotching – secondary colors have more. I don’t mean to exaggerate this – it’s not a big deal most of the time.
Blue is the dominant channel of the light - it seems maybe 25% brighter than red or green. Amber is much dimmer than the other channels - probably 50% of the other channels.
Build quality seems OK, but my light has two small issues - the holes drilled in the yokes are different sizes, and the main yoke is too small to take a 3/8" bolt. It could be easily drilled out, but shouldn't have to be.
Also, the main LED plate is crooked in the light - it's at about a 5 degree angle to the front protective lens. This is a little annoying in that you can't point the light by referencing the physical front of the light. Also, one of the mounting screws for the LED plate rubs on the acrylic protective outer lens, which scratches it. I popped the top cover off to see if this was just an alignment issue or if there was shipping damage, but the standoffs that support the unit are actually responsible for the angle issue. Other than these two issues, the light seems nicely built.
Dimming is reasonably good. Some of the criticism I’ve read about other fixtures – even other Blizzard ones, is that dimming is “steppy”. This fixture does have a little stepping – it lacks the thermal inertia of a conventional filament or a capacitor or some other smoothing circuitry, but it does dim pretty smoothly from zero to full – the steps are very small.
Blizzard has told me that this fixture’s PWM frequency is 400Hz. This is clearly fast enough for visual use, but when I shot a little video, there is some flicker with a channel at less than 50%. This is worst on the blue channel, for some reason. I shot at both 60i and 30P and this behavior happens in both formats. I will say that it’s better than what I’ve seen watching YouTube videos of some other lights.
For my purposes this is the biggest issue – I don’t do any events with IMag, but there’s often a camera running somewhere, and I would like to not have to worry about this. I’m interested in the Chauvet SlimPar Pro RGBA: http://www.chauvetlighting.com/slim-par-pro-rgba.html
which lists as a feature “flicker free for video”. The Chauvet fixture is a little more expensive than the blizzard and it lacks the single lens for all colors design of the Blizzard.
