CX Media Kit
| Exciting advances at last for moving lights |
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| Written by Julius Grafton | |
| Saturday, 20 June 2009 | |
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Imagine a lighting fixture with a lamp that is rated almost the life of
the fixture. This is the tantalizing possibility offered by Robe, the
first manufacturer to rush the LIFI lamp to market. LIFI stands for
light fidelity lamp, a tiny source with no filament which uses micro
waves to create a plasma light source.
It is very radical, as it can be dimmed down to 20% which means a standby mode is possible. The lamp was invented by the Luxim Corporation, who sought a long life solution for street lamps. That version of the lamp is claimed to run 20,000 hours, but at street-lamp dreadful colour temperatures. The entertainment version is de-rated for hours, and re-rated for colour temperature. The lamp itself is tiny. Robe showed their new Robe Innovative Concept fixtures, named ROBIN for short, at a series of roadshows recently. These include Spot, Wash and PLASMA spot variants. The spot and wash utilise Philips new MSD Gold/2 lamps, a 300 watt discharge lamp which Robe have joined with a new reflector for remote hotspot control. But it’s the PLASMA spot that has people talking, not the least due to the possible ‘whole of life’ lamp and its attributes. While the Philips discharge lamp based ROBIN fixtures are brighter, the PLASMA lamp comes close. Where it wins is better colour rendition, and the ability to dim down to 20%. It loses its colour temperature when it gets down around 60% of power, so ROBE simply combine a mechanical dimmer with an electronic one, and once the beam has been dowsered the lamp is switched down to run at 20% power. This has the obvious benefit of saving power against a traditional discharge fixture, which cooks along at full power even when the beam is shut off. The secondary advantage is the fixture doesn’t bake itself to death. Because the LIFI lamp is so new, the life is projected rather than known, and a caveat may be whether Luxim Corp use the Philips and Osram lamp rating method that says 50% of all lamps will last XXX hours. But LIFI is exciting. So too is the general suite of ROBIN features that deliver a TV and theatre friendly fixture due to low noise, fast iris, and very good CMY colour mixing. As to ROBE’s growth in the market, John Grimshaw from Bytecraft says across all the hundreds of fixtures they’ve sold, he cannot recall a single spare parts order. “When we tour other fixtures, there’s always a few cases full of spare parts”, he says. ROBIN will have its next industry showing at the Integrate trade show in Sydney, July 6 through 8 on the ULA stand. * From CX Magazine, July 15 issue. |
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