I’m proud of the diversity of our articles because we cover so many different stories, from so many different angles. With every story I read, I usually get a spark of info that leads me to think along another tangent. If the spark is big enough, I may expand on it and offer an opinion on something. Such a thing happened in the article we publish this month featuring Don Holder lighting the revamped Fiddler on the Roof on Broadway (see “Inside Theatre“).
While I’m not going to expand on that story, something he said about the demand by a producer to use all tungsten light fixtures got me thinking. Because I love tungsten. I think it looks so great on the skin of every race of people and there is something about the warm color of the beam that I find soothing. But, unfortunately for a lot of LD’s, it’s dying. It’s a lighting source that just may become extinct in another 10 years. Because people are switching to other technologies and, quite frankly, companies are going to stop making bulbs.
Martin had a great tungsten moving light called the TW1. In fact, they were using them on Fiddler, and the LD was raving about them and how he looks forward to using them on future productions. This is great, as long as he can find them in a rental house and as long as someone is making a bulb that will fit it. When Martin stopped making the fixture, they did a really cool thing. They offered a retrofit for turning the fixture into an LED sourced light. I’m not sure if anyone ever bought the retrofits myself. I think most vendors may have just chosen to spend their money on new products rather than revamping old ones.
Conventional Bulbs Fading
This month, we feature a Buyers Guide on Fresnels. You can see what is out on the market utilizing tungsten, LED and arc light sources. While Martin and Robe each make a moving arc light with a Fresnel lens and application, every other company offered me their LED version to list. Not one single manufacturer listed a tungsten model. Companies are offering retrofits to old models, but nobody is buying tungsten fixtures. (I bet ETC can refute this a tad.)
I was at the USITT show last week in Salt Lake City. This is a convention attended by lots of university students and teachers alike. Many of the conventional lighting fixtures used in theater were on display. From ETC to Altman, from DeSisti to Arri, all I saw were LED models of fixtures. These are all companies who made their name on tungsten. To survive, they had to go in another direction. Just like gobo or gel manufacturers are expanding to make other products, to keep in business with the changing times.
There is a Facebook group calling itself the Save Tungsten Campaign (www.facebook.com/SaveTungsten). It’s an interesting place just because I find all kinds of cool light products there. People post there with dreams of making incandescent bulbs that will be more efficient than LEDs. They are coating filaments with some material to make them brighter.
But alas, when you knock a lamp over, the filament breaks and you still have to replace a bulb. Face it, if you put 100 tungsten light fixtures in a truck and drive it across the city to a new location, you will lose some bulbs due to rattling around. Not to mention the ones that just need to be reseated. I don’t think I’ve lost an LED light source in transit yet.
Two great non-tungsten products were road-tested by us this month. The Atomic LED strobe by Harman’s Martin Lighting (page 55) is just a kick-ass fixture with some new bells and whistles, yet the same look as the old popular Atomic. I have tested every kind of LED strobe, and I like all of them for their individual attributes. But I think this strobe is what rock ‘n’ roll lighting designers will all flock to, because it looks like a Xenon strobe, and nobody has ever bad-mouthed the old legendary Atomic.
Lastly, I hate to admit it, but I have really not jumped on this hybrid light fixture bandwagon. There’s always something about each of these fixtures I like, but I also found faults with them as well. Then came the Robe WashBeam (page 56). There’s a new animal in the lighting zoo. Check it out this month.
For Nook Schoenfeld’s introduction to the April 2016 issue of PLSN, go to www.plsn.me/201604ednote.
