COLORdash Accent Quad

This is not the next big 1700-watt moving light, it’s not even a moving fixture. But it is interesting, because it fills a previously difficult-to-fill role, a small-color changing fixture that has a reasonably tight beam. Accent / cove lights for architectural applications are available, Color Kinetics has several items in this category, but they generally don’t accept DMX and power directly into the fixture1, and generally come with wash optics. The COLORdash Accent light changes that, with a 15° beam angle, it’s perfect for adding a little punch of color that’s more than just a flat wash on a piece of scenery. Arrays of these would be a fun way to add some cool beam effects to static pieces of scenery, or as small truss toners. I like the inclusion of an amber emitter to help fill in the spectrum, and it makes a lot of sense here (instead of a white emitter) since the intended application for these probably isn’t camera-friendly white light on a performer. I know that amber emitters have traditionally been difficult to get a lot of power out of, I wonder if Chauvet made the emitter on the chip larger to compensate for this. (I haven’t seen the fixture in person yet.)

Either way, I like it, I feel like there’s some really cool applications out there for a tiny little color-mixing spot light.

TMB Firefly

I wrote about this product a while back, and I finally saw it at LDI a few months ago. After seeing it, my excitement waned a touch for the “incandescent” version of their bulb for the festoon (The Firefly is a “self-leveling” festoon cable with a variety of lamp options available for it). In pictures of the product, the color temperature appears to be a very nice 3200K warm white light, but in person, the color had a very distinct pink “salmon” cast, and I could immediately tell that it wasn’t a real incandescent bulb. This is very odd, as I generally find TMB’s products to be high-quality. I will say that from the expected viewing distance of the product (greater than a few meters) the LED “filament” design was effective – if the color had been right, it would have difficult to tell that these weren’t real festoon bulbs. It might have been that I was seeing a prototyped version of the product. If I were to specify this fixture on a tour, I’d definitely go with the colored option, or put some different bulbs into the cables.

I don’t deny that there are applications where it makes more sense logistically to have a processing unit do all the hard work and supply power and data through some proprietary cable to keep runs cleaner. I just generally find it more useful to have a fixture that accepts power / data directly.