The Colour of Light

Visio, Lots of buttons and RGB confetti

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www.visiolight.com

The Visio-Pasolite 100M LED is an interesting fixture with a lot of unique technology for a production light.  The unit is a RGB+WA LED with a lot of control options over the colour mix of the individual LEDs.

Most importantly is that the RGB white mix is controlled separately from the white or amber LEDs.  In theory this feature allows better control in generating user defined “white” light letting the RGB white find its best balance independent of the white or amber light to achieve the colour temperature without having to stretch the performance of the RGB LED sets. Now my observations didn’t really see anything special going on light wise, as the RGB was added or subtracted I could not see any difference in the colour quality, but as I’ve said before it’s almost impossible to make any intelligent comments on colour temp without test equipment. 

What I did see though was at close ranges 1’to 3’the green and red LEDs seemed to overpower the white output and put a clear colour cast on my hand but it evened out as I got a little farther away.  This leads me to wonder about recommended distances for RGB type fixtures, an investigation for another day.

The unit is well built with a serious passive heat sink and a steel/aluminum chassis. Standard XLR style DMX connections and a tethered power supply a-la laptop style. Colour controls allow independent mixing of each RGB channel and a lock button to hold the current settings.  The unit features six memory pre-sets for your favourite colour mixes as well as pre-loaded mixes for 3200k and 5600k.

The digital readout allows the selection of pre-set colour temps, dimming levels and the readout for the independent RGB mixing levels. The unit uses PWM dimming that some consider a no-no for LED dimming but at its rated 25k frequency it shouldn’t be a problem for most situations.

Overall this unit is well built and has some innovative features but I just didn’t really like it.  It wasn’t very powerful and maybe that added to the uneasy feeling about its colour performance.

Truth be told I’m not a big fan of the tuneable RGB scenario in any light. Now the Visio does remove one of my major issues which is colour recall with its six memory pre-sets and individual RGB digital readouts but I’m still a single colour guy at heart. Too many options, too many setting, too many places to make a mistake and too many chances to need to reshoot, I like it simple give me 3200k and 5600k (and maybe 4000k for special situations) and I’m set.

If you’re in the other camp where RGB tune-ability is important and you don’t need too much power and reasonably priced this may be the light for you.

Make note however that no matter how I asked the question I could not figure out if you can actually buy this unit anywhere or if it was on Ebay.  Also of concern is that in their product brochure it shows a model being lit with the Visio LEDs but the majority of illuminated fixtures are good old tungsten studio lights.  In the pic in the brochure there is a strong and obvious “red” shadow behind the model on the white backdrop….not encouraging now is it?

BTW..dollars to donuts without a doubt Visio is the company that actually manufactures a number of lights marketed under the IKAN brand, maybe that's where you're supposed to buy them.

Here’s the numbers:
Pasolite 100M
3200K 97fc@1meter
5600k 130fc@1meter
$1300.00

Camlight, unique design in one area but too much plastic and old tech questions quality.

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www.camlight.com.cn

Camlight makes a variety of panels from small on-camera units to large 750 LED units. For most of their offerings there isn’t anything too exciting to report except for the fact that many are made entirely of cheap crappy ABS plastic, even the mounting spigots are plastic. I feel quality here is a real issue and these plastic units should be avoided.  They even have a printed warning not to use them if the temp gets to high! Now don’t get me wrong, sometimes plastic is a dream material but not this plastic. 

The standard LED panels are housed in stamped steel fixtures with the usual rotary dimmer, V or AB battery option and DMX control.  One complaint about the DMX is that it is via RJ45 connectors not the industry standard 3 or 5 pin XLR.  Now in a studio install RJ45 probably is fine but I haven’t seen too many Grip Trucks with big loops of RJ45 just waiting to control some lights, never mind terminating to a controller. The DMX is also only addressable via local DIP switches, old school and annoying.

Without wasting more time on the usual C-C-P designs let’s look at their unique focusable LED fixture.  The Camlight SL-9900 is an octagon shaped unit with nine articulating LED panels and these nine panels are very bright.  The panels are controlled via a manual gear knob on the back that basically pulls the centre panel in and out to alter the angle of the surrounding panels which I surmise are on a pivot hinge arrangement.  This movement created the flood or spot option on this unit.  Unlike other focusable LED fixtures where the LEDs have different lensing to alter their focus this unit has all spot LEDs and disperses their beam to achieve a flood effect.  Here’s the rub on this technique though, the beam field is way uneven in flood mode and way hot spot in spot mode.  The flood mode showed bands of light on the show floor about 6 feet away and the spot mode was a small 1 foot hot spot with rings at the same distance. Even their product photos show an uneven flood field.  To add to the issue this fixture was all plastic, with a mechanical movement required for focussing I would worry about how long it will last before the gears fall out. The SL-9900 had two large high speed fans mounted in the back panel to cool the LEDs and from the airflow I felt coming out of the unit I think that quiet is not one of this lights features.

Overall I didn’t like any of their lights; the plastic fantastic killed any idea of quality in my mind.  The focusing light seemed more gimmicky than useful and used loud fans, non-standard DMX and old school DIP addressing.

Here’s the numbers:
SL-2500 5600k 180fc@1m $500.00
SL-3300 Bi-colour 440fc@1m (all LEDs on) $1100.00
SL-7500 5600k 830fc@1m $1100.00
SL-9900 5600k flood 900fc@1m spot 1500fc@1m $2000.00

T&Y, panels with a familiar design but a few improvements over the mass of C-C-Ps.

www.ty-light.net

Ok, let’s get full disclosure right off the start; T&Y said they would give me a really nice tin business card holder if I can to their booth and measured their lights, and they didJ.

T&Y are more of your standard design plurality LED panels but at least some effort has been made to improve on this basic design from the usual “RnD” (rip-off ‘n duplicate) of most other panel manufacturers.  T&Y offers a full range of lighting units including fluorescent, tungsten and some interesting Arri-look alike HMIs.  Their products are still only available on the internet but they are willing to Skype, MSM and Gmail to communicate with you, and their spokesperson Crystal was reasonably knowledgeable about technical matters.  T&Y has seven different LED fixtures that share the same basic platform but are unique enough to be interesting on an individual basis.  Also to note is that T&Y’s claims of performance are modest and more believable than many LED companies I spoke with. No wild CRI claims or that they have built the next super nova of lighting.  T&Y claims a modest low 80’s CRI for all their panels, something even a big CRI doubter like me can believe.

The T&Y LEDs are enclosed in an aluminum and sheet metal fixture with standard DMX connections, on- board slide dimmer or rotary dimmers and battery mount options.  The slide dimmer was maybe the main dissatisfier on these units as it felt sloppy and loose, sure to be a trouble spot as these sliders tend to be as demonstrated on the DJ lighting fixtures that I have lingering in the scrap pile.  The slide dimmer is only shown on the “studio” models and the rotary dimmers on the bi-colour models.  I also didn’t like the single mounting point on some models as I don’t think it was sturdy enough for the weight of the unit in any position other than straight up.

The dimming system on the bi-colour panels is not very intuitive, there is a separate dimmer knob for 3200k, 5600k and 3200+5600k, three knobs and I’m not sure why. I get that one works the 3200k LEDs and the other the 5600k LEDS but what’s the third knob for?  Couldn’t get an answer I understood on this one so let’s call it a language barrier issue and move on.

Let’s look at the various models: the LED600, LED1200 and LED2400 come in various flavours including 3200k, 5600k, bi-colour (with 4000kish mode) with 45 degree spot or 60 degree flood LED lenses.  The LED1200 also has two V-mount or AB battery mounts. I don’t know if two batteries are required to run the panels or if this is some type of “hot-swap” system, answers were again unclear. The 2400 LED unit did not have a battery option displayed but one is listed in the brochure.

 

The panels had an accessory slot on the front for barn doors and diffusers.  Many of the models on display had the diffuser in place and I recorded it showing about a half stop difference.

 

Now here is where T&Y gets interesting, on their newer models they are using 8mm LEDs – not the standard 5mm used by almost every other panel manufacturer including the original Litepanels.  The LED8-240, LED8-420P and the LED8-420 bi-colour all use the larger 8mm LED.  Now T&Y claims that this larger LED doubles the output of their standard 600LED fixture when using only 420 or the larger emitters, I certainly did not find this when I measured their lights.  The standard 5mm units were actually about 10% brighter.  Much dismay and commotion was caused when whom I assume was the manager of the booth could not believe the results. We proceeded to check the fixtures several times without wavering results.  I suspect what happened was that the LED8-420 that was labeled a spot fixture was actually a flood….or well, 8mm LEDs suck.

 

Overall these T&Y units were built OK, especially compared to other Chinese offerings, but didn’t light a fire in the performance category.  I’d be curious to see what owners of their HMI fixtures have to say, they looked OK but with HMI so many important items are hidden under the hood a quick look means little.

 

Here’s the numbers:
LED600 Single colour 5600k 45 degree spot  340fc@1m   $450.00

LED600 Bi-colour 60 degree flood $490.00

3200k 90fc@1m   5600k 110fc@1m  4000k(all on) 180fc@1m

LED1200 Bi-colour 60 degree flood $800.00
3200k 110fc@1m   5600k 130fc@1m  4000k(all on) no measure

LED8-420 Single colour 5600k 45 degree spot (bet it was a flood) 300fc@1m   $1100.00

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Hakutatz… The Lowest priced LEDs at NAB, also maybe the Lowest Quality.

www.hakutatz.com.cn

I met with Tony at the Hakutatz booth (Tony, really now, who printed these business cards) and got an enthusiastic demonstration of the lamest panel at the show. 

These panels featured some bizarre options that I could not get my head around like two dimmers on the back that seemed to work half the LEDs on the panel. Why would you only want to dim every other LED independently? The explanation seemed to be that one dimmer did the 0-50% range and the other the 51-100% range…I still don’t get it. The panels are available as 5300-5900K models only in 500 and 1000 LED configurations.  The deluxe versions have remote controls for on-off but not dimming.  They are also available with yellow and blue diffusers.  Let me tell you that the blue one won’t be needed as these LEDs are clearly blue to start with (see pics). 

These panels have brightness comparable to their competitors but the light quality looked horrible.  I know it’s almost impossible to make a comment on colour without proper testing but these were SOOOOO bad you could see the blue from down the asile.

Not only were these units the lowest in quality but also the lowest in price, and like the saying goes “you get what you pay for”.  I saw very weak plastic construction, almost all the parts were plastic, and the whole unit flexed when you moved the tin barn doors.  The most serious issue is that the dimmer controls are directly mounted to the PCB board without a chassis bolt/nut the isolate it from the solder joints, I suspect that this defect would render the panel useless in just a few uses.

Without a doubt the leaders in the “C-C-P” race.

Here’s the numbers:
HK-500  5600k  600fc@1m   $160.00
HK-1000 5600k  500fc@1m   $260.00 (that’s right, double the LEDs, less light)

Remote control panels same price.

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