By Mike Wood
We have definitely reached a plateau in automated LED profile spots in that there is now a tacitly agreed-upon outline specification that all manufacturers are working to, with differences in their own particular special features. That broad specification is for a unit with a white LED engine, CMY + CTO colour mixing, one or two colour wheels, one or two gobo wheels, framing, and iris, plus beam effects. What we’ve seen is the brightness of white LED engines rise year-on-year as the technology improves, and it hasn’t stopped going up yet. We are seeing an arms race, with lumens as the target. The downside – to me, at least, as I get older and struggle to lift them out of their road cases – while the first LED-based fixtures were lightweight compared to their HID lamp predecessors, they are now back to similar weights. They use less power, produce less heat, and don’t need new lamps every 500 hours, but the weight has crept up. As LEDs have become the norm, product differentiation is now in the details of the engineering, special effects offered, and innovations to help make the user’s life easier.
This month, I’m looking at the new Robe Forte LED luminaire. As with the last Robe product we covered, the Esprite, the Forte uses the company’s in-house LED white light engine in which the LEDs are separate from the
homogenizing and collimating optics, allowing placement of the colour-mixing wheels in an optimal place, in the middle of those optics, for smooth mixing. This system also provides the ability to remove and replace the LED engine relatively easily.
Read the full review at: Lighting and Sound International
www.robe.cz
Australian Distributor: Jands www.jands.com.au
