Pixipixel Offers Chroma Q Space Force

Let's start this article with a little question:

What has Britain's Got Talent, The Royal Shakespeare Company, The Welsh National Opera, Kaiser Chiefs, The Killers, Stereophonics, Michael Bublé and The Eurovision Song Contest all got in common?

Some of you folks may have guessed it's something to do with lighting and you would be correct. No prize, however, as with this being an article about lighting it wasn't really hard to work out, was it?

So yes, all the above artists have recently used lights by Chroma Q to add some light to their performances.

Chroma Q have been producing high quality lights since the mid 1990s and launched on to the LED market in 2004. They have a good reputation for producing award-winning premium LED lights for concerts, theatre productions, retail, leisure, museum installations, and exhibitions.

Today I want to draw your attention to the nicely named "Space Force" soft light. This is the latest offering from Chroma Q and it's a rather nice take on the good old sci-fi space lights but now in LED form.

It only seems like yesterday when the LED lights made their debut on our photographic world but we are already getting so used to them and the many advantages they offer us in the production side of things. It's hardly necessary to explain the cool running reliability of LEDs or the 100% dim-ability and full colour temperature adjustability from 2800 – 6500k, so I won't, but suffice to say the all new Space Force from Chroma Q has all of this.

Space lights are designed to flood large areas with lots of lovely uniform soft light and to do this they often have to be quite powerful and hence tend to run rather hot. Historically they also require diffusion, usually in the form of a softbox or lantern. Also, as they tend to be pointed straight down, heat can be an issue. Only some lights are able to do this without "cooking" themselves. Rather nicely, the Space Force produces an output of up to 26,700 lumens, roughly comparable to a standard 6K fixture, and without any form of extra cooling required they won't cook themselves even if pointed down and with no fan required they run almost silently.

Diffusion is built in as with most LED fixtures so you don't need to add anything else (we do have an egg crate and a lantern available to fit if you need). In normal operation (without the egg crate) it will give you a 60-degree beam angle.

Best of all (well as far as our drivers are concerned), it's only 8kg in weight, so it is easy to handle for its size. Our unit comes with a yoke for mounting but also has options available to hang or stack numerous lights together.

Full onboard controls are on the rear of the unit allowing for complete stand-alone operation and just in case you need it, full DMX control is also catered for.

Other nice functions include a "focus" button that causes the unit to revert to a pre-set intensity for when you need to check your focus (okay, I had to look this up as focusing a space light seemed a bit of an oxymoron), and two useful memory functions are available allowing you to "store" the settings on the light for recalling later.

Don't be fooled by the name Space Force or the term Space Light. Yes, this is a space light but it's far more useful than that and can be put on a stand and used horizontally as a lovely simple soft light. All of our units are fitted with a yoke to allow for this sort of operation.

So in summary this is a lightweight, cool running, quiet and yet very powerful space light, all of which make it an attractive alternative to the regular units. With impressively high CRI figures (up to 97) and a fraction of the energy consumption of the non-LED equivalent light (331w at 230V), it's sure to be a winner.

The Space Force has already won an award at the Cine Gear Expo Technical Awards, coming in first place, however, I bet they are hanging on my personal BCR score, so here it is – 8 out of 10. That's one point for each side as it's an octagon. It's a polygon too but that's something to do with a missing parrot so I won't go there.

Oh, and we have 40 of them ready and waiting for you so don't look any further than Pixipixel, no matter how big your lighting needs are.

A specification sheet for the Chroma Q Space Force can be viewed here.

Article contributed by Bruce Lindsay, Pixipixel.

www.pixipixel.com