Big, Bold, Beautiful
Was LDI 2007 the biggest one ever? It’s hard to say. Even after three days of cruising the show floor, I never saw the end. It’s hard to say if it had any more square footage or more exhibitors than previous years, but it felt like a big show.
Physical size of the show floor notwithstanding, there were many big things about LDI this year. With the ab-sence of Martin and High End Systems, several other companies stepped up with big displays. The American DJ group of companies, including Elation and Global Truss, were at the front of the hall, along with Rosco and ACT Lighting; Robe and Chauvet were at the back. In between were ETC, MDG, Tomcat and Barco, all with sizeable stands.
Chauvet made a big statement with its “Thinking Green” all-LED booth and walked away with an award for the “Best Big Booth.” The stand was filled with LED products, including the new Colorado™ 3, Colorado™ 6 and Colorado™ 1. Meanwhile, Robe made a statement of its own by showing up with a 2,800 square-foot booth, the biggest on the exhibition floor. Among Robe’s new products were the Media Hub 5000 DT, Media Server Qube Control, DMX Control 248, ColorSpot 2500E AT, ColorSpot 1200E AT and the ArcSource Outdoor 36 LED fixture.
Though there was plenty of space in the Barco booth, the company chose to quietly show its soon-to-be released (June 2008) DML 1200 digital light in a meeting room outside of the exhibit hall. Still, it made a big impression on many people. The four UHP 300-watt lamps in the fixture register big on the illuminance meter, and the XSVGA+ DLP engine produced a beautiful image.
Other noteworthy new products on the show floor included: the d3 from UVA, a 3-D visual playback system that can be used to visualize and control playback of creative LED video and lighting products; the Elation Im-pression LED moving yoke fixture with enough punch to compete with conventional fixtures; the Horao 3-D LED display on the Creative Technology stand, though it didn’t generate as much buzz as it did at PLASA two months prior; and the ETC Eos, or more specifically, the ACN functionality that’s being implemented in it.
And speaking of ACN, the Control Protocols Interoperability Pavilion on the show floor gave us much to think about. Examples of ACN capabilities and the details of the OpenACN project were on display, while some RDM-enabled products from 14 different manufacturers, including a PR Lighting XL-1200 Spot fixture and a Robe ColorSpot 700E AT, demonstrated the RDM “Discovery” process. Wybron gave away free RDM re-sponder source code with royalty-free licensing in an effort to boost the adoption of the standard. There were more than a dozen takers; however, there should have been hundreds. Wybron CEO Larry Turner says that the company is still getting inquiries about the source code.
Perhaps the industry just needed to get over the LDI/Thanksgiving holiday before cranking up the RDM and ACN machines. That would be a beautiful thing.
