That's entertainment

Iain Ruxton went along to the recent PLASA show to catch up on the entertainment lighting sector. Here he picks out some new products with architectural applications

The PLASA show at Earl’s Court is not a mainstream show for those of us in the more architectural and public-realm side of the lighting business, but it’s always worth a look at what our friends in the entertainment lighting world are up to. Because their agendas and priorities are different, manufacturers serving that industry often come at things from a different angle. And in among the waggly lights and the smoke machines, there are always some useful things to know about.

For me, there wasn’t an awful lot of impressive equipment this year that I hadn’t already seen, but the trends were clear.

Colour changers

Unsurprisingly, LEDs were everywhere again this year. A few years ago, all the LED kit at PLASA was about source-viewed luminance… video matrices, colour-changing staging/dance floors, linear battens, etc, etc. More recently, however, the industry has been looking at LED as a source of useful illuminance – lights to light up things rather than lights to be looked at in themselves. There is of course a parallel to the LED journey we in the architectural lighting world have been on over the last few years, but I would suggest that we are a little further along the Gartner hype curve…

The Philips Color Kinetics kit crosses between the two worlds of course, and is still some of the most convincing equipment. There were lots of seemingly similar products on show, but for my money, most are not as cleverly integrated in terms of control – networking in cleverer ways than traditional DMX infrastructure becomes necessary for architectural installations which can include hundreds or even thousands of luminaires.

One or two things are worth a mention though. ETC’s “Selador” range of 7-colour LED colour mixers (yeah… count ‘em… seven!) has expanded to include new form factors, new gamuts and a brand new IP66 version. They aren’t cheap, but the colours achievable and the transitions between them really blow away an RGB system. Intended for theatre and event lighting, these could have great applications in other fields. Be careful though – a lot of architectural control systems will be a struggle to program for those 7 colour mixes. Clever luminaire profiling and colour pickers become essential. At a smaller scale, Philips Selecon’s PL1 LED spotlight was shown last year and remains a very clever piece of kit which anyone involved in museum, gallery and exhibition work should probably have a look at. On a simpler note, I liked SGM’s architectural LED products too… much more straightforward but intelligently executed.

Spot check

One of the lighting tools which architecture has long inherited from theatre is the profile spotlight, or gobo projector… and the major manufacturers of these are busily pushing into the LED world too. Not an easy challenge, as the optics of focussed projection rather depend on a point source in a reflector, rather than an array of separate point sources. There are various ways of tackling this, but more about that perhaps in a future blog. In terms of what was at PLASA this year, there were a number of efforts on show, but I couldn’t help finding them disappointing… the amount of light actually delivered is low (beware the use of “source lumens” in marketing!), the quality of the field not great, and in some cases the luminaires are so large that they look like serious military hardware. This is the first year I’ve seen serious efforts at LED profiles though… by next year we can expect major advances, I am sure… the days of the 575 or 750W tungsten lamp as the only option for a dimmable profile are numbered.

As with most tradeshows, the most interesting things are being shown by a small number of people, to a small number of people, in secret meeting rooms around the venue. PLASA this year was no exception… I can’t reveal any more at this time, but I can say that I have seen where the LED profile spot is going to be next year and it is seriously impressive. That is a piece of equipment which will find its way quickly into architecture, retail and exhibition as well as performance.

The other area of products at PLASA which are always interesting, to me at least, are control systems. Leaving aside the live theatre and event consoles, things of interest to the architectural lighting practitioner this year included the new touchscreen controller from Pharos, who have also rationalised their range and their pricing. Artistic Licence, DMX-gadget-makers par excellence, showed a potentially useful Ethernet DMX recorder among other life-savers. An inevitable consequence of all the LED kit is the need for control systems that can handle huge channel counts and deal with massive matrices. The controls manufacturers are tackling this on every level from the standalone installation controllers to the large Broadway consoles and media servers.

PLASA for me also wouldn’t be PLASA without some good widgets… cables, connectors, clamps, filters, all event and theatre kit, but the sort of stuff that can help an architectural designer to solve an awkward detail or achieve a particular effect. If you go to PLASA it’s easy to be dazzled by the LEDs, the moving lights, the big projectors, the holographic-projection DJ consoles (yes… honestly)… but don’t diss the widgets. One year my favourite thing in the whole show was a cable-pulling kit. I still intend to buy one when I finally get around to rebuilding my kitchen!

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