Tom Khazoyan

One additional note. I have also re-celled my Aaton batts with higher-amperage nicads. They work fine. One caution; always check the work, especially if you are using a non-camera specialist to do the re-cell. I had on battery that was assembled with an un-insulated terminal that shorted to the shield of the 4-pin connector. It tested fine with a meter, but no one noticed that there was 12V at the shield. It ran the camera fine, but it fried the video assist on an LTR54. And it was an intermittent issue. Seems that it shorted out if you applied a bit of twist when you connected the battery to the camera, but not always. I had to open up the battery case and add insulation to that tab of the battery pack. But it cost us dearly to fix the video assist. They don't have a fuse for that side of the circuitry. The camera was OK and I think it's fused to protect it. So be sure you check any re-cell. -Tom

Hi All, I finally found the 1200W HMI Par64 globes. One source quoted $850/each! In the end, we got part of a special order from Kennedy Webster. Our cost was a much more reasonable $275 or so. We got four spares for our two heads. In our case, we are going into production in a foreign country so we can't leave anything to chance. Here is their info. Owner: Raymond Schulmacher C/O Kennedy Webster Electric CO. 133 North Jefferson Street Chicago IL. 60661 PH: (800) 531.2852 Fax: 312.876.1612 raymond.schulmacher@kennedywebster.com My opinion is that I would probably think very hard before purchase those heads. I was naive and un-informed, as were my DP and Gaffer. The globes were only recently discontinued and we didn't do our research ahead of time. But for our purposes on this production, I'm happy with them. If they die by the end of production in the jungle, we'll just walk away from them. We could never afford to rent comparable lights in our situation. But I anticipate they'll come home and we'll keep them going for a while. I have heard about retrofits, but I can't Google any info on them, so it's probably something I'd have to dig around for. Maybe when I have nothing else to do some year... ;-) - Tom

That's a bit better than the best quote I received- about $500 each (for min. 10 units). But the quantity gets everyone. I need a couple. I'll pass the word around. Maybe we can do a group-buy. If you know of anyone who needs some, let them know. I did ask Barbizon here in Denver if they wanted to stock a few but haven't heard back. Arri's offices refer you first to Barbizon if you ask about the PAR64s. But, of course Barbizon doesn't have any either. Thanks for the tip.

Hi All, I've got a pair of old Arrisun 12 (1200W) HMI PAR heads. They are working but I'm going to be using them on an upcoming project. I want at least one spare lamp for them. The problem is that they use HMI 1200W/Par64 lamps. Osram no longer makes them and the current manufacturers make them by special order only. So the vendors want a minimum order of 10 lamps (@ $5-600 each)! I'm looking for more sources for such lamps. Or a few other owners who want to pick up spares! Thanks in advance for the ideas.