Early this year I was cruising the aisles of NAMM when I came across the Elation Platinum Spot 5R. It's pretty difficult to assess a new light at a trade show, but what caught my attention was the contrast between this light and the ones right next to it. It was brighter. But the kicker was that it was smaller and it drew less power than those other lights. I had to figure out why. To be truthful, I already had a good idea because I had spoken to Roger van den Plas, the head of Philips Entertainment Lamps in Turnhout, Belgium, just before the 2009 LDI show. He told me about a new lamp called the Philips Platinum 5R that they had just started selling, and that a manufacturer at the show would be showing a fixture with it, but he didn't say who. I did see this fixture at LDI, but it didn't particularly stick out, because there were no other fixtures nearby to compare it with. But now there is one sitting on the floor of my shop, waiting to be tested.
Physically Fit
When I took it out of the box I was surprised at just how small it is – 13.2 inches wide, 17.7 inches high, with a 14.2-inch-by-13.3-inch base. And at 32 pounds, it's a piece of cake for one person to handle alone. It reminded me of the first 250-watt moving yoke fixtures that came out more than a decade ago. At the time, it opened lots of new markets for automated lighting, and suddenly you would find them in smaller corporate gigs and medium-sized tours – places where they had previously been unseen.
The Platinum Spot 5R has the standard 3-pin XLR input and output for DMX, but it also has a 5-pin XLR input and output. It has a six-foot power cable and a 5A external fuse. It accepts voltage from 90V to 250V at 50 or 60Hz.
On the front panel, there is a full color LCD display and menuing system, which makes it easier to read, set up and operate. It displays full color icons with subtext guiding you through the menu. On the rear panel there are four DMX512 ports – a three-pin XLR in-and-out and a five-pin XLR in-and-out. Since the DMX512 standard calls for five-pin XLR connectors (even though three-pin XLS connectors work just fine with the original DMX512 standard) and there are now optional uses for them in DMX512-A, it's nice to see a fixture with five-pin XLR connectors.
Pleasing Punch
The intensity of the fixture is what originally caught my attention, and when I measured it with a Minolta T-10 Illuminance meter, my impressions were confirmed; it's bright. I measured 52 footcandles (560 lux) at a 40-foot (12.8-meter) throw and a beam angle of 15.3°. If my calculations are correct, then you should be able to put 100 footcandles on a surface from almost 29 feet (8.8 meters) away.
Using a Fluke 43B power quality meter, I measured the current draw to be about 2.45 amps at 120 volts, meaning you can safely put six of these fixtures on a single 20-amp circuit. The power draw is 300 watts and the total light output is about 6602 lumens, yielding an efficiency of about 22 lumens per watt.
The lamp is powered by an electronic switch-mode supply, which contributes to the small size and light weight of the instrument. Electronic power supplies typically have a high- enough frequency to avoid flicker problems. The lamp accounts for 160 of the 300 watts used by the fixture, and it has a color temperature of 8,000K and an average life of 2,000 hours.
Fixture Features
There are eight slots plus open white in the color wheel, two of which are color correction dichroic filters. Some of the colors, like the blue, green and yellow, lean towards pastels, while the red and magenta are neither pastel nor are they very saturated; they're in the middle. The red also tends a bit towards orange. The indigo color is my favorite, and it looks very saturated.
The fixture has eight rotating gobos and 14 non-rotating gobos. The speed of rotation varies from very slow to extremely fast. There are enough gobos to provide a wide variety of looks ranging from breakups with fine detail to fans with fat beams.
Other features in the fixture include remote focus, motorized iris, strobing, variable frost, a three-facet rotating prism and dimming from 0 to 100 percent. The iris, strobe, and rotating prism can operate at very fast speeds and they can also ramp down to very slow speeds. I think the very slow speeds are more useful than the fastest speeds, especially with the rotating prism effects.
The range of the pan can be selected between 540° up to 630°. That's the widest pan range I've heard of, although when it's set to 630°, it doesn't pan as quickly as it does in the 540° setting. The tilt ranges from 0 to 270°.
Operation
There are three modes of operation: DMX512, stand-alone, and sound activated. There are also three DMX512 modes; standard, basic, and extended. Extended mode uses 16-bit values for pan, tilt, color wheel, gobo rotation, gobo indexing, rotating prism indexing, focus, dimmer, and iris. In stand-alone mode you can run programs stored in the fixture using timed steps or audio-triggered steps. Both modes support master/slave capability. A built-in DMX512 sequencer stores up to 10 programs comprising up to 64 steps each. The steps are selected from up to 250 user-programmable scenes. The scenes can be programmed from a DMX512 controller or by using the menuing system at the fixture.
I used a Swisson XMT-120 to program a slow fade to black in order to observe the dimming curve. To my eye, the dimming was smooth, but it does exhibit some slight artifacts in the last 25 percent of the dimming curve. You can faintly see the image of the dimming shutters when the beam is projected on a surface. It's particularly noticeable on videotape. However, when you are only looking at the beam and not a projection, it looks very smooth.
I also programmed a slow diagonal focus change to observe the smoothness of the pan and tilt. At very slow speeds, the movement did exhibit a slight amount of steppiness. Only for the most critical of users will this be a problem, since it was slight.
The only other potential issue is that the lamp source has a color rendering index of 75, which is not great for rendering skin tones. But it is right in line with most other automated light sources these days, which can vary from a CRI of 65 up to 80 or more.
Many years ago, when the first 250-watt moving yoke fixtures were introduced they created a sensation with a number of production companies that were involved in lighting corporate events, small to medium-sized bands, and similar events. This fixture introduces a new level of efficiency, brightness, size, and feature set that is sure to ignite the flame once again.
Elation Platinum Spot 5R
What it is: Automated moving yoke luminaire
Who it's for: Lighting designers who want a bright automated fixture in a compact size.
Pros: Small, lightweight, bright, wide range of features, efficient.
Cons: Slight dimming and movement artifacts.
How Much: $1,999.99 (MSRP).
