There is an eyewear shop on Kensington High Street in London with a poster in the window that says, “I’d like to see all the top designers under one roof.” The lady in the poster might just as well have been referring to the lighting exhibition that was taking place around the corner and a few clicks down Warwick Street in Earl’s Court. While many of the usual suspects plied their wares at the European trade fair, the show had plenty of unusual aspects this year, some of which were utterly sublime.
The Usual
You can’t have an entertainment lighting exhibition these days without including automated lights, LEDs and automated lighting consoles. In this regard, PLASA did not disappoint. Advances in lamp technology, as well as advances in other areas of automated lighting, are feeding the appetite for new, more efficient automated lighting. The Philips Lighting Fast Fit and short arc technologies are a prime example: According to the company’s press agent, they have outfitted 19 fixtures from 11 manufacturers over the last 18 months. They include three new Alpha 300s from Clay Paky, the ColorSpot 700E AT and ColorWash 700E AT from Robe and 1200-watt fixtures from Coef, Coemar, FutureLight, High End Systems, Martin, PR Lighting, Robe, Selecon (the only conventional fixture of the bunch), SGM and Spotlight.
But there were no complaints registered about the plethora of automated lights, as everyone wins this game. Manufacturers and distributors have new products to offer, end users have an increasing variety of options from which to choose and the general public is being treated to more dazzling shows than ever.
LED technology is another example of new lamp technology driving new product development. The new Luxeon K2 3-watt LEDs seemed to be in every third new product at the show, and niche manufacturers are popping up like mushrooms after a three-day rainfall.
The Unexpected
But it wasn’t just business as usual.
We’ve come to expect LED fixture after LED fixture at trade shows, but the growing number of moving-yoke LED fixtures was a bit unexpected. Moving-yoke LED fixtures included the SGM Geni Mobile, DTS Delta, GLP Impression (which will be distributed in North America by Elation), Robe ArcWash 236, Anolis ArcWash 136 and 236, Studio Due NanoLed and several variations on the Ayrton stand.
And in one of the more puzzling moves, a display of truss with three “Moving LED” fixtures greeted attendees upon entrance to the show, but no information about the fixtures was given. That’s a shame because the fixtures were impressive.
Also, if you were coming from North America, then you probably met with another unanticipated event. Upon arrival at the airport, we Americans were given a stark reminder of how the cards are stacked when we traded our wads of dollars at the currency exchange window for a paltry sum of British pounds. Now we know how the European manufacturers must feel when they’re pitted against U.S. manufacturers or when importers in the U.S. have to pay for foreign goods. American goods are relatively cheap, making it difficult for Europeans to compete when the exchange rates are like this. Despite the considerable obstacle, only a few complaints were heard.
On the other hand, no one was complaining about the large show turnout this year. Perhaps it’s not totally unexpected, given the healthy state of the industry, but having to elbow your way through the rugby scrum in the PLASA aisles is not something we have come to expect.
If people are flocking to PLASA, manufacturers, it seems, are staying away from ACN in droves. Despite having been released as a standard almost a year ago, ETC seems to be one of the few manufacturers who have been busy implementing it in their Eos console. There also seems to be a complete lack of products embracing it. Instead, there seems to be a push toward standardizing streaming DMX or an ArtNet-like protocol. We didn’t see that one coming.
The Utterly Sublime
The big question on everyone’s lips was, “Where is the big news at this show?” Many people agreed that it was difficult to point to any single product that will reshape or redefine the industry, but there were a couple of contenders for the show’s most interesting concept. One was found at Australian software developer Light Factory’s corner stand. Their PC-based lighting control software has an interesting feature. With every recorded cue, there is the option of entering notes, which is not unusual. But it also has a text-to-speech generator, so it can actually talk to you while you’re cueing a show. This might come in handy if you can pipe it into a ClearCom and let it call followspots for you.
Taking it to the next logical step was Cast Lighting. Their demonstration of Dynamic Focus Tracking allows you to automatically track actors and scenery as they move around on a stage. At the moment, it works by using dynamic focus positions in WYSIWYG and it will eventually become a receiver linked to a motion control system. WYSIWYG will then do the calculations to stay on target while all attributes other than pan and tilt will remain under the control of the operator.
Also drawing many comments was the Horao 3D LED display on the Creative Technology Germany stand. The golf-ball-sized LED array takes the 2D concept of the Barco MiSphere and shoves it into the 3D world by cubing the display, which also has the effect of cubing the number of pixels and thus the channel count. The volumetric pixels are known as voxels. If it catches on, Artistic Licence and Pathway Connectivity should thank them for creating new demand for their networking products.{mosimage}
It’s unclear whether all the top designers were in the house for PLASA 2007, but one thing is certain: The top entertainment manufacturers were well represented, and lots of people — top designers or not — were packing the aisles.
Send Richard some unexpected e-mail at rcadena@plsn.com.
