Big-Boy LED at Little-Kid Pricing
There are two good reasons to get excited about Chauvet’s new Colorado 3. It adds a feature — affordability — not usually associated with an LED color wash fixture of this quality. And by “this quality,” we mean a well-built, big-boy instrument, not a child’s play thing.
Plus, the fixture is completely self-contained (no external power supply), and the chassis is a very solid chunk of aluminum with an interesting finish that makes it look and feel almost like rubber. The face of the fixture and the rear electronic hous-ing compartment is made of a heavy-duty polycarbonate. The complete package, when you first pick it up, feels surpris-ingly sturdy.
Mechanics
The fixture is 22.5 inches long by 7.5 inches high, and it has three groups of 18 LEDs — a total of 54 1-watt LEDs — ar-ranged in a circular configuration, with six red, six blue and six green LEDs in each group. It has four cables permanently attached; DMX-512 in, DMX-512 through, power in and power through. The water-tight connectors are a dead giveaway for its high IP rating, which is IP65. That means it’s protected from dust and rain, so it’s perfectly at home out-of-doors. It has a typical LCD menu display with four buttons for Enter, Up, Down and Exit.
One of the coolest features is the clever interlocking system for connecting multiple units in various configurations. There are six interlocking mechanisms built into the chassis with three nondetachable hinging bolts and screw knobs. Two are on each of the two long sides and there is one on each end of the fixture. By putting two or more fixtures end-to-end, you can build a long batten, or you can connect them width-wise to make a matrix of LEDs. The built-in cabling allows you to safely feed up to 22 units with a single 120 V 20-amp cable and data cable, then daisy chain both the power and data cable to all the units. It’s a very versatile and easy-to-use system. But since each unit weighs 22.5 pounds, you might take the combined weight into consideration before you build your monster grid.
Photometrics
Using a Minolta T-10 Illuminance Meter, I measured the light output with a 19-foot throw. In white, it produced about 320 lux (about 30 footcandles) with a 10 foot 6 inches field (31 degree field angle). In red, I measured 150 lux (about 14 foot-candles) with a 10-foot field. To put this in perspective, I took the fixture to a space with 40-foot ceilings and projected the fixture up a wall. I compared it to a gelled 3-cell, 1000-watt cyc light, and I was surprised to find that the Colorado appeared to the eye to be brighter and more saturated in color.
The Colorado 3 can be operated by using a DMX-512 controller or in stand-alone mode with a master/slave configuration. Under DMX-512 control, it uses 12 channels and offers two different modes. Interestingly enough, you can switch between the two modes from the console by setting channel nine to a value between 245 and 255.
In mode one, the first seven channels control the intensity of red, green and blue as well as premixed colors: yellow, cyan, purple and white. Channel eight is the strobe selection, and channel nine, in addition to switching between DMX-512 modes, offers eight automatic color changing macros.
Channel 10 is a unique feature that extends the individual control of a single universe of DMX-512. Oddly enough, there are only 244 DMX-512 addresses available on this fixture. (Note: Chauvet says that the new versions have 512 addresses.) But channel 10 is something called an ID address selection, which gives you individual control of up to 66 fixtures on the same DMX-512 address. By setting the ID of each fixture to a unique number, you can control it by itself even though it has the same DMX-512 address as 65 other fixtures. Channel 10 also allows you to temporarily control all fixtures simultaneously by setting it to 0. That would make very short work of producing a big monotone color wash.
Channel 11 allows you to turn individual modules within the Colorado 3 on and off. And channel 12 gives you 50 preprogrammed color patterns and chases. In mode 2, you have more direct control over individual modules.
The Colorado 3 is unique in that it has seven discrete channels for specific colors — red, green, blue, yellow, cyan, purple and white. You can control the intensity of these seven colors with one channel, but any other mixed colors have to be dimmed with multiple channels. For example, if you mix 100% red and 50% green, to fade to black in one second, you would have to program the red to fade from 100% to zero in one second while green fades from 50% to zero in one second. It’s a bit of a challenge on most consoles.
Performance
The 1-watt LEDs in this fixture look pretty much the same as you might find in LED fixtures of this variety, so, as you might expect, the colors are similar. They blend well at longer throw distances and they exhibit some nonuniformity at close throw distances. The strobe effect is everything you would expect in an LED fixture — very fast and very effective. LEDs, by their nature, are very fast to turn on and off. For that reason, it is difficult to produce a smooth dimming curve in an LED fixture. But the dimming curve in the Colorado 3 is every bit as good as any other LED fixture I’ve seen. If you look hard you can see some steppiness, but it’s not bad.
The best part of this fixture is the brightness and the pricing. At a minimum advertised price of about $1000, you can’t go wrong with it. It’s punchy, it can throw a long way and it has all the bells and whistles you expect from an LED fixture. This new Chauvet offering is a truly professional fixture that looks as if it will hold up very well on the road.
