Well, now it’s now official. Everyone that has ever made a moving light has officially thrown their hat into the ring and produced an LED profile that moves. Many continue to play catch up, while High End Systems continues to move forward. The first company to bail on all discharge lights and dedicate their future inventory to the use of LED engines instead is moving forward and updating their line with brighter and better revisions that make the world of lighting a better place. This month, they release the new SolaFrame 1000, designed to fill a hole in their medium range framing fixture line up, replacing the SolaFrame 1500, which debuted in 2012.
“Our customers wanted a medium level fixture that offered more bells and whistles,” says High End’s Bruce Jordahl. “With the advances in our technology today, we were able to deliver a more compact fixture that indeed provides more attributes as well as brightness, while slightly drawing more amperage than our previous model. After five years, a lot has changed in LED technology, and a smaller light engine now dishes out more lumens than the 1500, which is well past five years old. With our 1000-watt light engines delivering more output than most on the market, the time was right to offer an upgrade.”
High End offers the SolaFrame 1000 in two models, the Ultra Bright or the High CRI. The Ultra-Bright offers a higher color temperature and higher output, but with a lower CRI. The High CRI model offers a higher CRI with a few less lumens — the color rendering is better in this model. SolaFrame 1000 ships with a TM30 Filter that boosts the Ultra-Bright engine to 85+ CRI. I’m working with the Ultra Bright for this road test.
The Light Beam
I take the light and shine it on a wall 10 meters away. It’s quite bright as I measure just over 900-foot candles at that distance. The manufacturer claims the light emits 20,000 field lumens. The spot on the wall is perfectly white from the 480-watt light source. There is no evidence of color around the perimeter, just a sharp round edge. The native color temperature on this particular model, which has a maximum power of 900W, is 7000°K.
The zoom on the fixture operates fast enough to be able to use it as an effect. It scales down to 12°, which is plenty tight for a hard-edge profile. On the other end, it only reaches 40° with a hard edge, which I presume is due to the physical size of the fixture and the desire to remain a medium physical size. It appears to zoom wider when the edge is softened. The fixture has the ability to retain a sharp focus, even when zooming in and out. There is an iris that closes down just enough for the fixture to emit a pencil beam that flares out slightly. The front aperture of the fixture is only 107mm wide.
The Color Systems
The color mixing system just may be the best I’ve seen on a moving light lately. I say this because the cyan, magenta and yellow flags all offer maximum saturation. This makes mixing a lovely deep blue easy as putting together the cyan and magenta opposing color flags at full. I’m talking that deep sexy blue rarely seen since the Vari-Lites of long ago. I dare to say I actually have a nice medium red mix here. Green, a color that usually beats the lumens out of a light, is a lovely L124 (if not deeper) shade, and plenty of light comes out. I usually reserve that particular color for a wheel of dichroics.
The variable CTO wheel is the cat’s meow. I say this in earnest, as it’s very valuable to the system, not just because it can take the color temperature all the way down to 2800°. For years, I have had moving light manufacturers tell me to add the CTO in if I want a deeper red or blue. I never had much success with that suggestion…until now. When I add the CTO to the full blue I’ve mixed I’m looking at a Congo blue output. It does add a deeper state to the red mix as well.
There’s a color wheel as well with six interchangeable dichroics plus the open hole. The usual green, dark blue, medium blue, orange and red hues join the TM-30 filter, which is a minus green that will boost your CRI in this model. Half color combinations read beautifully as one has become accustomed to with High End fixtures over the years.
Texturing the Beam
The SolaFrame 1000 comes with two gobo wheels, all with interchangeable patterns. One of them holds seven gobos that are fully indexable and rotate in either direction at variable speeds. It can accept glass or metal gobos. The other wheel is static and can accept .5mm thick metal gobos in its eight slots plus open. Less than half of these gobos are ones I recognize, which is refreshing. Particularly attractive is the Starvolver gobo which consists of five individual hexagon cutouts. A pinwheel with lines and dots gives an amazing aerial beam as it spins in the haze. I do note that none of the gobos include color. This is a bonus for fans of the gobo roll function, where the wheel spins as opposed to the gobos.
High End managed to fit in a fully rotatable animation wall as well. This functions as one would expect and looks great alone or mixed with other patterns. The light also includes a variable frost that is true to form. It doesn’t consist of two separate lenses that can be overlapped, but one gradient even lens. It can evenly cover a textured beam almost to the point of wiping the gobo out, or come in just enough to blur out any sharp edges in the beam.
A single 3-way variable speed prism is the last effect I thought the light had to offer. I started mixing animation wheels with various gobos to see how the beam looked. Then I added in the prism and found some great looks projected on the wall. To put the cherry on top, I found some macros that allow the light engine to chase slightly through its different sections, giving me a flickering type effect. The animation wheel, complete with the flickering and some orange color mix, gives me the ultimate fire effect.
As expected with every SolaFrame fixture, a four leaf, full framing shutter system is included. Each blade can do a full wipe across the optical path for a curtain style reveal of light. The whole module rotates smoothly in either direction.
Strobe wise, the fixture executes the normal sync and random strobe rates one would expect. For the first time in my life I see a function called Synchronous Random Strobe. I only have one fixture to play with, but I’m guessing that High End has come up with a way to have a whole rig of SolaFrame 1000’s do a random strobe, but all flashing in unison. That’s cool.
Movement-wise, the light moves at a medium speed, which is to be expected. It takes 1.5 seconds to go from 0-265° tilt. The motors offer plenty of torque and one can execute a circle effect flawlessly at a good speed. The light can mount in any orientation without worries of losing its precision focus.
Hardware wise, the aluminum and steel chassis is housed within a sleek black molded plastic cover. (White covers available upon request). It is protected by an IP20 rating and includes the patented lens defogger. For a small fixture, it still weighs a hefty 70 pounds. A PowerCON TRUE 1 connector can feed 100-240 volts to the fixture. Signal is accepted through 5-pin XLR in and outs or Ethernet connectors. DMX or Art-Net or sACN via Ethernet connectors is accepted. The fixture does run RDM, but there is only one mode of operation and that requires 49 channels.
Fans are designed to vent air in and out of either side of the fixture by the light source, preventing dirt and fog juice from getting to the inner guts. They operate in three speeds.
