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I'm in the market for a lighting instrument punchier enough to put light trough windows (appearing daylight) on a budget. Yes, I know. Price and light flux are two competing factors.

 

We are going to use a Sony FS5 so we have the tremendous advantage of a 3200 native iso.

 

My first thought was a Joger Bug 800 but I was immediately put off by it's price. Our budget can only stretch to 2500 USD. Besides that, HMI lamps and ballast problems can definitely hassle us if something goes wrong.

 

I then turned out to recent LED fixtures. First I was turned over by BBS Force V but since it's an engine only we had to buy a lens system that throw us of our budget once again.

 

It was perfect though, since I'm looking for an instrument with well defined shadows that can be diffused as I want or need to.

 

Nonetheless, I'm not able to find a fixture with those qualities on this price range (I'll be very appreciated if you remember one), and that lead me to Litepanels Hilio D12. It's kind of a mini maxi-brute configuration into a LED fixture with a 575w kind a like HMI throw (or so they say).

 

I've travelled to the nearest dealer to see it working and I can say that it really has the punch, but it's a kind of soft light (which is no surprise being a large source), that casts multiple shadows when it's not diffused. When you diffuse it, you will end loosing it's inicial punch, which this light is all about, so I'm very confused on what instrument to acquire.

 

Renting is a non option. This fixture will be part of a long run project and will be much cheaper buying than renting. Besides that, it will be an instrument that will serve many purposes on the long run so it will be an asset for our small production company.

 

Any ideias on this topic will be very appreciated. Thanks.

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Do you require a daylight beam (shaft of sunlight) or just a fixture that will provide a daylight color temperature? Maybe consider acquiring used, like a 1.2k HMI.

 

Daylight beam.

 

It will be bought within a budget plan to be externally financed for our next project, so I find it hard to acquired it used in these circumstances.

Edited by Alexandre de Tolan
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You have hit what I see as the current problem within our industry.

As a manufacturer who makes, or has tried, all light sources from Tungsten to Plasma I see the problem as this.

 

I don't want Tungsten or HMI as they are old technology and get hot.

I do want LED as that is new and will last forever and cost nothing to run.

 

However LED does not have the quality I need at an affordable price.

You can get very punchy LED - expensive.

You can get very cheap LED - generally useless in most cases.

 

You have done some good research and your results makes sense to me.

 

OK so here is the sales pitch and please stop now if you don't like it.

 

Please look at our Platinum Blonde.

1.2kW HMI open face (UV Safety glass of course)

Give you similar amount of light as an ARRI M18 (1.8kW)

Can be focused to some extent - spot or flood.

Will work with any ballast that has an ARRI connector - so getting a spare is easy.

The lamp is inexpensive so you can put a fresh one in before an important shoot.

 

http://www.photonbeard.com/hmi-lighting.html

 

 

If you need more info please contact me.

 

Thanks

 

Peter Daffarn

Photon Beard

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Here's the problem.

 

If you're okay with it looking a bit homemade, building the lamphead is not difficult. I could give a blow-by-blow account of every nut and bolt, and I probably will once I've had it all powder coated and it looks a bit more presentable, but honestly, anyone with the ability to build it probably has the ability to design it. It's just a series of mechanical problems with the goal of getting the arc in the middle of the reflector. I just bought a used 575W MSR-based source four PAR clone from eBay, ordered a G22 hot restrike socket, and figured out how to bolt one onto the other so that everything lined up.

 

I guess there are a couple of pointers worth relating. I used the MSR-based clone because I knew with reasonable confidence that it would be supplied with a UV-safe lens (though I am now stuck with that one lens until I can find a supplier who will specify their lenses for UV safety). Otherwise, you could do what I did to more or less any source four PAR. You'll be replacing the back cap anyway, since even the MSR PARs, which seem really to be intended for club and architectural work, don't have caps big enough to accommodate the big hot-restrike HMI and the associated G22 base. I also sprung the small extra cost for the reasonably new UVS-suffix Osram HMI bulb, for a belt-and-braces safety solution. And then I verified it was safe experimentally, which you should do by sending it to a certified testing lab, which will be expensive, but which might (might) better satisfy liability concerns. After all, one bad scenario is that you subject someone to enough UV to ulcerate their corneas, which can easily progress to an infection and the loss of both eyes. I am not kidding.

 

Then I made up the header cable using appropriate 7-pin Amphenol Ecomate connectors.

 

But this is the easy stuff. That's just mechanical engineering. The hard stuff, which you can't easily homebrew, is the ballast. The price of a complete Chinese 575W HMI on eBay, and the price they charge for the ballasts alone, is such that you may only realise a 50% saving over just buying one, so it depends whether you consider tinker time fun and are willing to write it off.

 

Some of the cheapest Chinese ballasts, such as the one I have, are effectively stuck permanently in what Arri call "flicker free" mode, which works but may provoke acoustic noise from the lamp.

 

It isn't a panacea, although I am now the owner of a 575W HMI PAR for probably about US$500 and a spare weekend.

 

The best solution, of course, is for Peter to make something far less rustic, and for you to buy one. My description of homebrew techniques is not intended to encode anyone to try it, both because HMIs involve lethal electricity and because I'm perfectly well aware that not everyone is into DIY.

 

P

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575 HMI profiles are tricky because there really isn't space. GAM actually sell one with the exact same ballast I have, but they tend to have the bent-lamphouse L shape to make room. The G22 hot restrike lampholder is a big hunk of ceramic and the lamp base is huge compared to the MSRs used in things like intelligent lighting (though the quartz envelope and arc tube assembly are, as far as I can see, the same).

 

And no, you really, really can't get away with hot starting MSRs. There is much lightning and a stench of ozone!

 

P

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Hi Phil,

 

We are always open to ideas from those who actually use the products. The Platinum Blonde was conceived in just this way by our dealer in LA saying to us one day "I'm sure you could put a 1.2kW lamp in that housing".

The problem is in order to make a commercial product it then took 2 years of testing, modifying and retesting. It is OK if your home made kit has an issue - you can make do and mend but if we sell it to the other side of the world and it fails mid shoot we get a lot of stick, quite rightly too. Then we have to add the cost of warranty, CE approval, Safety testing, factory overheads etc etc.

Very quickly your US$500 become US$1000 unless we can make hundreds of them and then it can go back to US$500. This is all before we make any profit to fund advertising, dealers margin, future design etc etc.

Then factor in the likely sales. Most US networks will not use HMI anymore due to some idiot using one without the safety glass in and having it close to the presenter who ended up badly burnt from the UV. So they are not buying.

Independent guys are looking for LED as they see it as a perfect solution - but of course it is not.

 

Having said all that I would like to talk to you about your design.

 

The platinum Blonde can take a 575W lamp but the issue is not all ballasts will auto sense the lamp fitted so we cannot promote this feature. There is, on most ballasts, a dimmer as well so you can go down to 50%. So the Platinum Blonde housing can effectively take you from 287W to 1200W with a lamp change or 575w to 1200W without changing lamp.

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The immediate impression of the platinum blonde is simply that it is very powerful. Open-faced lights are of course efficient, but put a big 1.2KW HMI in a Blonde and good grief...

 

Two-Sun.jpg

 

Left: Sol A. Right: Photon Beard Platinum Blonde. On Mars.

 

 

Very quickly your US$500 become US$1000

 

Well, of course; this is why I was reluctant to hijack the thread with a description of it. Just to put it through a certified UV safety inspection would have doubled the cost of doing it.

 

I fully recognise all your concerns. Unfortunately LED is really some way away from being able to do anything over a couple of hundred watts and then with rather dubious colour performance (though HMI is hardly a dead flat spectrum). You and I know this, but everyone else...

 

P

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Please look at our Platinum Blonde.

1.2kW HMI open face (UV Safety glass of course)

Give you similar amount of light as an ARRI M18 (1.8kW)

Can be focused to some extent - spot or flood.

Will work with any ballast that has an ARRI connector - so getting a spare is easy.

The lamp is inexpensive so you can put a fresh one in before an important shoot.

 

http://www.photonbeard.com/hmi-lighting.html

 

 

If you need more info please contact me.

 

Thanks

 

Peter Daffarn

Photon Beard

 

Hi Peter,

 

Thank you for your reply. I've download your Platinum Blonde spec sheet and compared its photometric chart with both ARRI M18 (with 1.2K bulb), and K5600 Joker Bug 800.

 

I have to say that it's almost on par with ARRI's being slightly less efficient but at a fraction of the cost. Well done. The Joker is visibly less efficient for the same beam angle but as the added advantage of a possible narrow beam than the Platinum to increase it's flux (besides all known accessories that turn Jokers into great lighting options).

 

The ARRI is way out of our budget. The Platinum and the Joker are somewhat in the same ball park price with the added advantage that you are based in Europe so import charges will be zero. Anyway, both would be stretching our budget beyond what we first planned but I sincerely thank you for giving us another option to consider about.

 

 

 

 

 

Well, of course; this is why I was reluctant to hijack the thread with a description of it. Just to put it through a certified UV safety inspection would have doubled the cost of doing it.

 

I fully recognise all your concerns. Unfortunately LED is really some way away from being able to do anything over a couple of hundred watts and then with rather dubious colour performance (though HMI is hardly a dead flat spectrum). You and I know this, but everyone else...

 

P

 

Phil,

 

HMIs are somewhat prone to spikes as you state but we can't dismiss the fact that they still are the best way to "manufacture" sunlight, and with the added benefit of modern higher sensitivity cameras even small HMIs can produce beautiful effects. That's why we first thought of an HMI fixture for us.

 

Ideally, someone would already had the ideia to produce a Beam LED light powerful enough to put Christian Berger's CRLS system lighting techniques to work with modern cameras, thus discarding the big and costly Panibeam light. I have to say that I never lighted that way but love the ideia of lighting trough controlled reflectors without light spilling issues. No flags, no cutters, no light loss in between. Lovely ideia.

 

As I see, Litepanels have tried to shape their Hilio D12 output with something similar using nanoptics filters.

 

Anyway, as I told Peter, for how much we'd liked to buy an HMI out of the shelf we haven't the means to do so. That's why we turned our heads to Hilio. It's raw output is compared to an 575w HMi. It has the added benefit of dimming to 0% without color shifts, it runs cooler, draws only 350w of power from an outlet and LEDs last forever, but since it still costs about 2500USD I'm going to send you a PM and ask for your guidance trough the adventure of assembling a 575w HMI as you did (if you don't mind).

 

I've done a quick search for Chinese ballasts on Ebay and didn't found any cheaper than 500USD though.

Edited by Alexandre de Tolan
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Resurrecting this thread since I continue in this quest for the "perfect" light for our project.

 

I did not now of AADyntech (probably because I cannot find anything from them in Europe, even when searching on the internet), but realized that they make some very interesting LED fixtures with huge amounts of light output from a LED light.

 

The Jab 2 Variable seems a great fixture (that we could consider if the Dollar/Euro conversion was back to 2011, due to our budget constraints).

 

They don't give specifics on CRI though. Does anyone ever used one of their lights? And does anyone knows of an European manufacturer that sells something like this? Danish BBS lights - although quite good - are way less powerful.

Edited by Alexandre de Tolan
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Alexandre,

 

I measured the extended CRI on the AADyntech lights at NAB this year using the Sekonic C700 and they all pretty much had a rendering average around 80. Fiilex has the Q1000 if you need more punch. Cineo has the TruColor LS and Maverick lights - the HS will be out of your price range. I don't know how well any of these compare to a 575W HMI. I use the Hive Bee and Wasp plasma lights quite a bit and they get compared to a 400W HMI.

 

Mole was showing off some larger LED fixtures this year when we stopped by their booth.

 

Stuart

--------------------------

illuma.blogspot.com

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A disturbingly large proportion of the LED lighting that's on sale today is extremely bad.

 

This remains true even if you exclude all the really obvious cheap far-eastern stuff. Some of the biggest names in the industry have repeatedly churned out the most awful shod.

 

Every year at NAB we're told the problem is solved, and every year we look at this stuff, and it's overwhelmingly terrible. This is rather reminiscent of the situation that existed for years with 3D, where everyone would claim the problems were solved with their expensive new products, and you'd walk around the show and end up with a terrible headache from it all. The difference is that LED is ultimately a good idea and will probably endure, it's just got a bit of work to go before we're there.

 

Despite what we're told by manufacturers, LED is still very new, and making stuff that isn't just terrible remains difficult and expensive. Remote phosphor LED makes good results easier.

 

P

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You and I know this, but everyone else...

No, I know that as well.

Funny, I've just now gotten back from a conversation with the Property Manager of the organization I now work for.

A couple of years back, some executive who has now "left to pursue other interests" got a bee up his arse about changing all our stores' ageing fluorescent lights to new LED replacements.

I would have just said get new tubes (about $2.15 in bulk for quite good ones) and starters, and you'll probably get another 15 years out of them, but no, he had to get these whizz-bang new LED "plug in" replacements, at about 6 times the cost. Apart from the fact that the imbecile electricians they hired completely ignored the instructions to check the ballasts to make sure they were the old-fashioned iron ballast type, thus seeing a goodly number of LED lights getting fried by high-frequency electronic ballasts, the reliability of the lights themselves was terrible ("made in Vietnam", what did you expect?), plus the colour rendering was all over the place.

Therein lies the irony: In our head office where they did the initial "test" rollout, clearly they were supplied with a better grade of light, because if you take photos anywhere in there, the colour rendition is uniformly excellent. Go out to the warehouse it immediately varies between OK and Fugly.

 

I'm actually experimenting with a prism assembly out of a pair of cheap binoculars to see if I can make some sort of "Spectrum analyzer" (in the original sense), which might serve to demonstrate exactly how shouse the CRI of a lot of light sources actually is... :rolleyes:

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Resurrecting this thread since I continue in this quest for the "perfect" light for our project.

 

I did not now of AADyntech (probably because I cannot find anything from them in Europe, even when searching on the internet), but realized that they make some very interesting LED fixtures with huge amounts of light output from a LED light.

 

The Jab 2 Variable seems a great fixture (that we could consider if the Dollar/Euro conversion was back to 2011, due to our budget constraints).

 

They don't give specifics on CRI though. Does anyone ever used one of their lights? And does anyone knows of an European manufacturer that sells something like this? Danish BBS lights - although quite good - are way less powerful.

 

The Jab is pretty powerful, but as I recall has a bit of a green spike in it - the light isn't great and it's not actually too focusable as it has more than one 'bulb' (maybe it was the Jab 1 I used, that was a good 3 years ago now) .

 

I think it is also over your budget, no? I was going to suggest a Hive plasma par, it's 5x as powerful as a Jab and the quality of light is stunning, better than an HMI - but, again, over budget ($3,500 for a kit - £1,750 GBP I paid for mine from Barbizon Europe) - still, cheaper than the Jab by the looks of it. Not sure how much the 1.2K blonde is though (Peter, I'm certainly interested: colin@colinelves.com). I also have one of the cheap chinese 1.2K HMIs (and I mean cheap: £500, nuts!) It does the job. The ballast is noisy as **(obscenity removed)** and it's a touch green (mostly because of the cheap bulb they included I think) and everything is a little sticky and wonky so I've no idea how long the damn thing will last... But you get what you pay for.

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I was going to suggest a Hive plasma par, it's 5x as powerful as a Jab and the quality of light is stunning, better than an HMI - but, again, over budget ($3,500 for a kit - £1,750 GBP I paid for mine from Barbizon Europe) - still, cheaper than the Jab by the looks of it.

 

I think we can stretch that far. I went looking into it after your post and it really seems a very nice light. I never seen one working but I like the fact that it's a such small source so it will most likely throw hard shadows. Not having that option is what is keeping us away from LED fixtures like the Hilio D12.

 

Nonetheless I'm a bit skeptical buying a fixture for this kind of money that I've never seen at work, and it seems that it's not sold where I'm working right now (which has been a mix between Spain and Portugal for some time now).

 

From the photometric chart I can see a tiny advantage over ARRI's M8. Joker's 800 has a much higher output with no lens on it but looses with it's first lens (the medium). Never worked with an M8 but comparing it to Joker Bugs will be better for me since they have been our HMI workhorses for some years now.

Edited by Alexandre de Tolan
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The only technical issue I see with the Hive stuff, other than the fact that it doesn't really exist in high power, is that it doesn't hot-restart. Because it's an electrodeless lamp (which is good) there just isn't any way of pumping enough energy into it for the gas to break down when it's hot. Lack of hot strike is not a complete dealbreaker, but I'm left wondering what the plasma technology has to offer over - say - a 250 watt CDM lamp, which as I understand it is fundamentally the same technology, albeit conventionally electrode-driven, but costs one whole hell of a lot less. Cool Lights makes a 150 CDM fresnel. I have some retrofitted source four PARs which are very serviceable. Hive, conversely, is staggeringly expensive. US$4k for a 276-watt, non-hot-strike discharge light? Yikes. You can buy a real Source Four PAR HID for that, several times.

 

P

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I'm actually experimenting with a prism assembly out of a pair of cheap binoculars to see if I can make some sort of "Spectrum analyzer" (in the original sense), which might serve to demonstrate exactly how shouse the CRI of a lot of light sources actually is... :rolleyes:

 

I've been meaning to get a 'prism' kit which would allow me to get spectra cheaply... for my even cheaper LED light analysis... but alas... where does the time go...

 

On the other hand the Sekonic C700 as mentioned by Stuart just works... and has a number of graphing options showing the spectrum of a light, but also graphs of various color bands, which is in formative about the 'true' CRI rather than the bulk average that is often given, and yet does not really indicate the 'badness' of a light...

 

For a DIY example:

 

http://sci-toys.com/scitoys/scitoys/light/spectrograph/spectrograph.html

 

As a note, I do think a lot about just presenting in B&W and avoid quite a bit of the 'color' issue... most people don't worry too much if a 'color' map to a known grey value... so the fact that the spectrum of the or even the color cast of a light is 'off' in some sense will not affect the visual representation... unless of course... people's lips go dark grey or black... but other than that... most color -> B&W(monochrome) seems to be ok...

Edited by John E Clark
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US$4k for a 276-watt, non-hot-strike discharge light? Yikes. You can buy a real Source Four PAR HID for that, several times.

 

P

 

It's not cheap but oddly I'm in trouble to find an alternative that outputs that kind of light for that kind of money (excluding the obvious HMI knock offs mentioned on another thread of this forum). HID PARs do not have that efficiency (taking into consideration that every photometric chart is correct), and HMI also have hot-restart issues. At the moment - and considering all options that we've been talking about here (aside building our own HMI) - this Hive light doesn't seem so bad.

 

Went to Cool Lights since you've mentioned one of their products. It looks great. Shame that they don't offer a big brother of that 150 CDM Fresnel like a 2K tungsten equivalent CDM.

Edited by Alexandre de Tolan
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