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Lighting Review: AC Lighting Chroma Q Color Block 2 LED fixture
For over 10 years A.C. Lighting with the Chroma Q line has been an innovator in color-changing technology adding products such as the Broadway, Cascade, Color Punch, Color Split, Color Web, and Color Block to the lighting designers arsenal of tools. Now they have created a new tool to add to this collection.
Based on the highly successful Chroma Q Color Block released in 2004, the Color Block 2 greatly improves on the original Color Block technology with higher brightness, better color mixing, and smoother dimming.
The new Color Block 2 fixture has the same size as the original Color Block, measuring two 3/8 inches high by four 11/16 inches deep and nine 13/16 inches long. Built with an anodized extruded aluminum housing, each fixture can be used as a stand-alone unit, or you can use the latching system to connect up to five fixtures together to make one large unit. There are also accessories for creating various shapes and configurations as well as numerous mounting options.
The Color Block 2 has an improved color mixing system consisting of four LED cells per fixture that are powered by multiple four-in-one RGBA LEDs that have red, green, blue, and amber color elements inside. The difference is that instead of the individual red, green, and blue LEDs in the original model, each RGBA LED in the Color Block 2 has all of the elements combined into one LED, as well as the addition of the amber-colored LED. This new LED configuration has several advantages. First when you look at the fixture you see a beam of coherent color coming from each one of the cells, you don’t see the individual red, green, and blue LED’s like you do in some LED fixtures. Second, with the addition of the amber LED you get much better pastel colors, flesh tones, and better orange and amber colors. Third, the four-in-one RGBA LED design eliminates the multicolored edged shadows you get when lighting something from close range.
When testing the color mixing capabilities of the Color Block 2, I could definitely tell that the quality of the color mixing had been extended with the addition of the amber LED. While the Color Block 2 still retains the nice saturated reds, blues, and greens of the original Color Block, the pastel color range was greatly increased. I was able to make nice pinks and light ambers as well as some nice lavenders. Yellow also looked very good and I got some nice oranges and red oranges in addition to the standard range of blues and greens.
The most impressive feature of the color mixing that I found was the ability to mix a nice warm white that made very good-looking skin tones. Since most color mixing LED fixtures don’t make very good warm whites this was a huge “win” in my book. I was also able to vary the color temperature of the white light to make a nice cool white as well.
There are two other improvements that have been made to the Color Block 2: higher output and better dimming. The Color Block 2 is noticeably brighter than the original Color Block. This isn’t surprising considering that LED technology has improved a lot over the last five years. What is somewhat surprising is the improvement in the Color Block 2 dimming. Chroma Q has updated the dimming in the Color Block 2 to what the company calls Theatrical Grade.” I just call it “sweet!”
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Greg Persinger is the owner of Vivid Illumination. He can be reached at greg@vividillumination.com.
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