So let’s talk about toys, shall we? I know it seems like everybody and their brother is making an LED product nowadays, and the ways that some people are integrating LEDs with video and other uses is pretty spectacular. Just check out YouTube for the videos of the LED stage from the Super Bowl that featured the new Hippotizer media server running through LED fixtures. Pretty amazing stuff. So over the next few weeks, we’ll look at several LED fixtures and what separates them from the field, as it were. With everybody making LEDs, it’s impossible for them to all be created equally, right? So I’m going to go over some of the fixtures, and what makes them different and what specific applications they are best used for.

The first unit we’re going to take a look at is the Spectra-Cyc by Altman Lighting. I got the chance to use these in a theatre show I lit back in September, and I was very pleasantly surprised at how bright they were, and blown away by how good the colors were. This is a real-deal cyc light, with an asymmetrical reflector and everything you would expect in a cyc light. There have been a lot of attempts to light a cyc with LEDs, some successful and some less so, but this is the only unit that I’m aware of that uses a traditional cyc light design to create the exceptionally smooth, even wash that we’re accustomed to in a cyc light.

The Spectra Series uses a 4-color LED system (Red, Green, Blue and Amber) to create a more complete range of colors than just using RGB color mixing. I could get into a lot of physics and graphs, but there are people who do that way better than me, but let’s just let it suffice to say that LEDs work similarly to fluorescent lights – some wavelengths of the visible spectrum simply aren’t present, so the better LED fixtures use more colors to try and fill in the gaps. The Spectra-Cyc is a 100 Watt fixture, so it’s very easy to light an entire cyc using just one 20A circuit! I used 5 units on a 35′ wide x 16′ high cyc and was very pleased with the coverage. To compare, I normally would have used 5 3-cell 500-watt cyc lights, for a potential power consumption of 7500 watts! My max power consumption using the Spectra Cycs was only 500 watts. Now of course you don’t typically turn all the cells of your cyc lights on at the same time, but you get the relative picture as far as power consumption.

Now how does this come into play in a church setting, you might ask? Well, moving lights are often hung on trusses. And trusses are often hung by chain. And chain swings when outside forces act upon it, and that makes your truss swing, and makes all your lights go wooga-wooga in a somber moment in the service, because you’ve blacked out all your fixtures, but you’re moving them into place for the next song. With the LightLock that doesn’t happen. Very, very cool. And moderately priced as well, with a list price that I can’t remember right off hand, but it was significantly less than the cost of the moving lights, so that’s okay, then.

So now for the other great news – this marks the re-re-relaunch of Lightingforworship.com! I now promise to make time to do at least one new product review each week. So manufacturers, please send me your press releases! Coming soon, I’ll talk about more LED products, the ETC Element console, the Altman Spectra-Cyc and whatever else strikes my fancy. If there’s something you particularly want to see, let me know!

The answer, which I’m sure you’re aware of, is “it depends.” LEDs have some great things going for them, but they’re not right for every application. This will be the first in a series of ongoing articles on LED fixtures and their place in your worship lighting rig. LEDs aren’t right for every situation or every application, but hopefully with the information we give you here, you can make a more informed decision so that you won’t be disappointed when you do put these low-energy, highly flexible instruments into your system.

First off, let’s look at some of the major manufacturers of LED fixtures and where they fit in the world. Then later on we’ll talk about how to use LEDs and where they are most effective.

You can’t really talk about LEDs for entertainment without talking about Color Kinetics. Now owned by Phillips, Color Kinetics has for years been one of the leaders in the market for LED equipment and color-changing technology. Most of their equipment is designed for permanent architectural installations, so it’s sometimes difficult to integrate it into a performance application. But they also have some fixtures like the ColorBlast TR and ColorBlaze that are designed for the theatrical world, with built-in XLR connectors and tour-worthy housings that can handle the beating that fixtures take on a daily basis on the road. The ColorBlast TR fixtures are very durable, with a lot of punch out of a very small fixture. I’ve used them on a show before and was very impressed.

Altman has been one of the leaders in theatrical lighting for decades, and after several years of flirting with LED technology, have come out with two products that are pretty impressive. Their Spectra-Cyc and Spectra Par are both 100W RGBA fixtures, meaning they use Red, Green, Blue and Amber LEDs to mix to a better white. The Spectra Par is built around the Star Par body, which gives the user a full range of standard PAR56 lenses to adjust the beam with. This is very useful to folks who are accustomed to working with PAR cans, as the beam shape is identical to what they’re used to. The Spectra Cyc is the only true LED cyc light on the market right now, as it uses an asymmetrical reflector to give more even illumination across a broad flat surface than anything else I’ve seen. These units aren’t right for every single application, but they’re good as a beginning to LED integration into a facility.

Next time around I’ll talk about Selador and Chauvet, and what those units bring to the table. Until then, stay bright.

ETC’s Express line of consoles was perhaps the biggest selling line of light boards in history, and with good reason. The ease of operation coupled with expansive feature set, brief learning curve and exceptional brand loyalty on the part of ETC customers all came together to create a sensation in lighting control like nothing I’d ever seen before. So it was with some trepidation that I took a look at the Ion, the console that was going to eventually replace the Express. I hated to see the Express go, it’s like an old dependable buddy for a lighting designer and a lighting system designer. But the fact of the matter is, you can’t buy parts for a 10-year-old computer anymore, and that’s what the Express was – a 10-year-old computer.

So I took a look at the Ion at last year’s LDI, and was happily surprised at what I saw. My initial concerns that the board would be too high-tech for the everyday end user were obviously unfounded, as for the basic theatrical application, the Ion programs very similarly to the Express. The only real difference is that the Ion, as a command-line console, adds a couple of keystrokes to some standard applications, but the differences are small enough that it only took me a few minutes to adapt.

But it’s not in the similarities where the Ion shines. It would have been easy to make another Express with new hardware, but that would have ignored the changes in the lighting world that we’ve seen in the last few years. When the Express debuted, moving lights were still limited to rock tours and Broadway shows. But as the years have moved along, moving lights, LED lights and color changers have become the rule rather than the exception in lighting systems. The Express got a couple of software updates through the years, but the Ion takes the platform of the Express and builds on it to handle moving lights and LED fixtures simply.

With a base model of 1024 channels, the Ion is designed for the complex systems that we’re installing todays. The Ion is also a Net-resident console, so it doesn’t require an old-school DMX cable network to function. But it also has two DMX outputs to fit seamlessly into existing installations. The dual monitors on the Ion provide a level of feedback that the Express couldn’t match, and with the multiple configurations available for the submaster/playback wings the Ion can be set up to meet the needs of any type of installation.

One of my favorite things on the Ion is the color picker, which uses a color wheel and a mouse to create any color you can imagine from your LED fixtures or color changers. The mouse and dual screens also allow for better control and programming of moving lights. If it sounds like I’m a fan, it’s because I am. The Ion from ETC is a low-cost, high-octane solution for churches that are looking to control conventional fixtures in a flexible fashion, or moving lights and LED fixtures with ease.