Info/Experiences with Opti Quad Par?

Hey scrogers and welcome to the forums.

I have a bunch of Opti Tri's myself that I use for theatre stuff all the time. Biggest reason I like the Tri stuff is no color shadows. I get a shadow of whatever color I am mixing vs 3 different shadows with standard LED stuff. Looks a lot more realistic for theatre.

Other advantages include the obvious, no more gels, 16.7 million colors (4.3 billion with the Quads), no more lamps, a lot less heat on stage, low power, etc. Brightness wise, they will go color for color with a 575w S4 Par roughly (par will come out ahead more with some colors more then others). The other nice addition with the white LED's on the Quads are better pastel colors, something RGB LEDs have a hard time mixing.

Now, some downfalls. With the way LEDs are made, you need to buy them in large batches. Otherwise, you end up with different LEDs with slightly different colors. They are basically like wallpaper, no two batches are exactly the same. This also isn't an Elation only issue, this is a global LED issue.

LEDs also dim by PWM, so if you are recording with a camera and depending on the camera settings, you will see the LEDs pulsing and/or strobing. As long as you keep it under 30 frames per second and/or progressive scan, you should be fine. Issue seems to occur at 60 fps shoots I have been on. They have also been known to give some people headaches because of this (myself included). Also long as there is other light sources however, I find it doesn't really give me headaches. They also don't dim like conventionals and tend to bump on and out so to speak. I often times have to change either the dimmer curve on them or make their fade times different then everything else.

The LEDs also aren't really zoomable (although Elation is coming out with some really neat zoom stuff, just not in the Tri's and Quads). So you will be stuck at a 25 degree beam angle vs the different lenses on the S4 Pars and zoom on the 6"s. Frost can help get it a little wider but I find that a frost in LEDs cuts down on the intensity much harder then on a conventional.

LEDs also have an extremely narrow bandwidth. Because of this, you will over expose anything under them to this. So if you have things that are light sensitive, be aware LEDs may cook them much faster then conventional lights.

The last and biggest problem with LEDs in theatre, the CRI is horrible. Colors and contrasts on costumes and sets won't come out well with LED only washes. Everything will just kind of wash out. So be aware with that when picking costumes and/or painting sets and using only LED stuff. I have had to have artists go back over things with more highlights and shadows to get the stuff to pop more under LED only washes.

Well, I can get the difference between a spot and a wash, but I am not really clear as to why an LED wash would be so diffuse compared to a conventional? It is because of the usage of multiple elements in an LED compared to a single element in a conventional?

That is part of the reason. The other reason has to do with optic trains. To get an LED spot, you have to do some interesting things vs a lamp where you just need a refactor and some lens/es. But I have found that LED washes are even less defined then conventional wash fixtures.

They also seem to drop off a lot faster towards the edges, so not as even a field. Again, has to do with more then one point sources. More sources towards the middle, brighter the middle. Less towards the edge, dimmer edge. Now, I haven't done any work with a signal point source LED wash yet, so can't comment on that.

I can sort of see what you're saying.

Even if we focus the tri-LED's, we're focusing multiple tri-LED's into a field, which by default, is going to end up with a predictable pattern of brighter and darker areas. And this issue would be magnified based on distance to target, so it's not as simple as you just move something back and forth.(such as a lens for example or at least not just one).

I would assume, perhaps incorrectly that a single very powerful LED source would work well with the reflector and len(es) approach. But I'm thinking to get to that point for now, that's gonna be rather expensive and I think there would be some heat issues. I'm nt saying the heat issues would be a killer, just that they'd run hotter than typical LED fixutres are running.

I know that ADJ, as well as Elation, are using LED's in movers. Typically, this is a single point LED because using gobos would be otherwise impossible with multiple sources(at least for the spot applications). But as far as for a moving head LED wash using a single element, that could be interesting. Don't most moving head wash fixtures have some basic lens in it?

Discharge moving head washes have a Fresnel lens in it that further help wash the beam of light into well... a wash. At least that is how I understand it. As far as a single point LED RGB fixture that color mixes that is quite an expensive thing to do. I know of maybe one or two that have done so and the fixtures cost a lot of money. We will get there though.
Sincerely,

Moving head wash fixtures typically have a Fresnel lens, but not always (VL2000, VL2500, VL500, and VL550 come to mind).

A local large sound and lighting company has a bunch of LED movers that can do color changing. I forget if these are wash or spot. I am betting that the fixtures behave somewhat like an LCD projector, in which a thin film screen is in front of the light source. Expensive? Yes, most definately.

Hmmmm.......I'd like to see that. You mean like a color scroller or something?

I'm not sure what it was. I was still learning about lighting then. I mean, we're not talking all that long ago though, maybe, 2004-2006 time range. Gotta check the raw Cache Creek pictures to see if I snapped a shot of one. All I can say is I saw it transition smoothly between various stated colors, and they changed up the orders. this wasn't some color scroll. All I will say is that it was a really big fixture. Not anything bigger than normal, just a large mover, high output.

The way I see it, if a white LED is providing broadband information, you SHOULD be able to gel it. I can easily see how an Red, Green or Blue LED is very "frequency dependent" and emitting a very narrow range of color, making gels not so useful.

I really started getting "modern" with my lights with the ADJ 64 LED Pros and MyDMX. Now that I know a lot more, I don't really want to move backwards!

Sounds like you are describing either a High End StudioPix and/or ShowPix. I know the first ShowGun was out around 2006, not sure about the ShowPix however.