Last week I saw this new fixture from Zap technologies. Those folks that brought us the big lite. It’s got the same base and one armed high speed yoke as the big lite, but has a really cool new head.
The head is a big square full of LED’s, but quite different from a show pix. They are RGB LED’s in clusters, sort of resembling a bank of par 36’s on an audience blinder. Each cluster can be brought up individually. The chases one can make on this fixture appear endless and it was fun to play with. When you turn on all the LED’s this sucker was blinding. Blows away the rest of the new large LED movers that I’ve seen in the last couple of months.
But they didn’t stop there. They put an ultra slim color changer on the front of it. This changer has cto and ctb colors as well as a couple of frosts for diffusing the beam. Not sure if this is good, but none the less, they were the first manufacturer I have seen to do this.
But wait, there’s more. If you tilt the LED head 180, they have a lo res video screen on the back side that plays video content. And it looks kind of cool. Years ago some manufacturer made a TV fixture that was a 5k fresnel on one side, but if you flipped it around, there was a 4x1k soft lite built in. But you could only use one or the other, because of the amperage drawn and the size of the plug. But I’m betting this Zap lite can do both. Imagine a fixture where you can illuminate a rear cyclorama, while the other side plays media files. Hhhmmm.
2 weeks ago I did a show where the promoter brought down a dozen of those Showpix fixtures. This is the new brainchild from HES that looks like a Showgun, but is a mass of LEDs. This is also pretty bright as an LED/ light fixture, but can play back video files. I had a great time playing with this fixture as a light and as eye candy. I was actually very surprised by the light beam. It was a nice round collimated beam.
Unfortunately, the next day they had my 5 video screens up and running and I realized these show pix didn’t cut it against the walls. So I used them to spell out Letters like “party on” and other nonsense and made sure the truss they were on was above all the rest of my video elements.
I think both these fixtures would be great in the right application and I am trying to think of one for some soon project. The unsettling part is that I would like to use them on a theater tour, with a smaller stage where they can punch out some light. But tours that size will have a hard time justifying the price of these things. So I better have a way cool idea to show the client…, before the price tag.
