Looking for professional flat pars

T

Tom Manchester

Senior
Jan 11, 2011
607
1
0
Delaware
www.electrosoundsystems.com
So I was all lined up to buy 8 chauvet colordash par quad 7's, but low and behold they were discontinued. It would seem that nobody makes a similar product in the same price range. The things I liked about the colordash were:

Size: slim profile to fit many in a small case, and they fit inside a 12" truss
LED's: 7x7W 4 in 1 RGBA. This is a big one, I don't like the look of individual LED's
Case: die cast type case is a must
Price: Chauvets were <$250 dealer

I've gone through seemingly every manufacturer's site and the colordash were the only ones that seemed to hit all these features at a decent price. Does anyone else have anything similar?
 
Re: Looking for professional flat pars

What's funny is I've never seen any pro fixtures with all-in-one LEDs. They just don't get bright enough because of the optics or whatever. All the Chroma-q stuff is regular, same with Martin, etc.

Ten feet away you can't tell they are individual, and when flown at 30+ feet, you're definitely never going to tell.

Even when I do uplighting with RGB pars, you can't tell.
 
Re: Looking for professional flat pars

Silas Pradetto said:
What's funny is I've never seen any pro fixtures with all-in-one LEDs. They just don't get bright enough because of the optics or whatever. All the Chroma-q stuff is regular, same with Martin, etc.

Ten feet away you can't tell they are individual, and when flown at 30+ feet, you're definitely never going to tell.

Even when I do uplighting with RGB pars, you can't tell.
Click to expand...


Martin Mac Aura
Martin Rush Par
Anything Clay Packy
 
Re: Looking for professional flat pars

Silas Pradetto said:
What's funny is I've never seen any pro fixtures with all-in-one LEDs. They just don't get bright enough because of the optics or whatever. All the Chroma-q stuff is regular, same with Martin, etc.

Ten feet away you can't tell they are individual, and when flown at 30+ feet, you're definitely never going to tell.

Even when I do uplighting with RGB pars, you can't tell.
Click to expand...

Martin has (or at least had) some stuff using multi-chip packages.

The issue is that fixture to fixture consistency is much more difficult to achieve with the multi-chip LEDs, for a number of reasons. This is often a concern for manufacturers catering to designers who want all their fixtures to match.

(For the record, I work for Color Kinetics)
 
Re: Looking for professional flat pars

Rob Timmerman said:
Martin has (or at least had) some stuff using multi-chip packages.

The issue is that fixture to fixture consistency is much more difficult to achieve with the multi-chip LEDs, for a number of reasons. This is often a concern for manufacturers catering to designers who want all their fixtures to match.

(For the record, I work for Color Kinetics)
Click to expand...

The color also changes depending on what angle you look at the fixture from, because all colors cannot originate from the exact same point.
 
Re: Looking for professional flat pars

I just purchased 24 Chauvet Colorado I Tri 7 Tour. Although they are not "slim pars" they are a compact fixure but are very robust (all metal), IP20 rated, DMX3 and DMX5 I/O, and are super bright for their size. I selected these over the SlimPARs as they have better heat sinks too and are about the same brightness.
 
Re: Looking for professional flat pars

After a lot of comparing and forum searches I settled on these as recommended by Kelly:
American DJ Homepage

I don't have any lights yet so I can't say for sure how good these are, but the pricing is right and they get great reviews.
 
Re: Looking for professional flat pars

Tom Manchester said:
Those look nice, and the pricing looks good. Are you a dealer?
Click to expand...

Nope, not a dealer. Just getting ready to take the plunge on buying direct from china. This was a quote given to me by vello light.

For me one of the biggest considerations for me is that whatever I get is fan-less. I have some puck 3nxs right now and the fan noise drives me nuts. Plus anything that doesn't have a fan is cast aluminum making for a much more durable housing.
 
Re: Looking for professional flat pars

new here, but seen your post, as it happens I have that exact vello flat par in my hand, 18x12watt rgbwa ,, Imported some last week to try out, first impressions they look great, but dig a little deeper and :(... The fan runs flat out constantly (no temp control at all) I will probably need to fit temp. control myself. the auto fades and chase programmes are useless. ie. on the slowest setting colour changes twice per second .It is really bright but suffers bad from led shadow..
 
Re: Looking for professional flat pars

I've had a sample here for a couple of weeks now as well. However the sample I have is the 12x3w version with the smaller body. Overall, i have been super impressed. I went with the 3w version to avoid the fan issue. FWIW I think most of the pars at this level that have fans run flat out as well. At least all of the ones I have had experience with. One fan may not seem bad, but put 24-30 of them up with any sort of boundary close and it gets pretty ridiculous. For my purposes the only thing allowed to have a fans are movers.

For the 12x3w version, the color mixing is exceptional. I have been really impressed with the yellows,oranges, and purples I can make. There is the slightest amount of red streaking visible on the yellows, but only for about the first inch out of the lenses. I'm not too concerned about the auto programs, except for the strobe which is perfectly fine. The menu is very nice and blacks out when not in use. At this point it has been running continuously on the auto function for over a week and is barely warm to the touch on the inside and the outside. It survived a ten foot fall from the truss onto bare concrete and it only cracked the outer retaining ring on the front, everything else is just fine. My biggest complaint is that the 25 degree beam angle is a bit two wide for my purposes, but they have agreed to do a custom 15-20 degree fixture for me for an extra 200 dollars per batch. This will sacrifice the color mixing a bit, but gain some intensity.

The fit and finish attention to detail both on the inside and outside is on par with what I have seen from chauvet's colorado and slim par pro lines. The housing is exactly the same as the chauvet slim par pro and colordash par lines. I'm not going to say the are the same fixture, but they share a lot of the same parts. Also, if you do a search on vello light on some of the import exchange sites you'll find that they have imported to several well known mid range lighting companies. Additionally, the sales person mistakenly (or intentionally) sent me the wrong tracking number at first which was for a couple thousand pieces to another respected lighting retailer.

Who knows, I am going to take the plunge in the next couple of weeks and order 40 or so pieces from them. I'll let you all know how it goes.
 
Re: Looking for professional flat pars

+1 on the Mega-lite Baby Colors. I've installed several fixtures and I am very impressed at the value for the $$.
 
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