LED fixtures are all the rage, and for a lot of good reasons. However, if you're looking at fixtures on a smaller budget, you'll often find that the beam widths are very narrow in order to make the fixture seem brighter, and if you back the fixture out to where it covers a useful amount of square footage (assuming you can even get that far back), the beam isn't bright enough to be useful.
When the ADJ COB Cannon LED wash fixture showed up for this First Look review, I was expecting a similar result. With a street price of around $350 (MSRP is $500), I didn't expect a lot of light out of it.
However, I was pleasantly surprised to have my assumption disproved. The fixture is bright—very bright—over a wide area. It comes with three lens options: 80, 50 and 40 degrees. With the widest lens in place, the fixture covered more of the stage than I expected, and was significantly brighter and wider than some of the other inexpensive LED fixtures our test venue had in its inventory.
The ADJ COB Cannon LED is an RGBA (red, green, blue and amber) fixture, and has multiple control modes. I picked the seven-channel mode, which gives you direct control over the four colors, a master intensity, a strobe mode, and control of the dimming curve model.
Hands-on
"It’s absolutely a huge step up from many of the inexpensive fixtures out there."
Jim Kumorek
Reviewer
So how did this fixture stack up? For dimming curves, the Stage mode gave the closest match to the ETC Sensor/Source Four PAR tungsten dimming we used for comparison. However, it was definitely not an exact match—we saw the COB Cannon start and end at a slightly different rate than the tungsten fixture.
The colors were nicely saturated, and the addition of the amber helped in getting color temperatures to match close to tungsten. With all four LEDs at full, my Canon XF300 video camera saw the color
temperature as 3,000K, and the colors on the video looked accurate.
The fixture is marketed as flicker-free on video, and while I did not see flickering per se, there were other artifacts on video. While dimming up and down, there was a light banding visible that scrolled through the video in all camera modes except when set to 29.97 fps with a shutter speed of 1/48s.
When not dimming, the beam looked fine at 100% intensity, but at 50% intensity some banding could still be seen, although it was more subtle than what I saw when the fixture was changing in intensity (probably because it was stationary instead of scrolling).
The 80-degree and 50-degree lenses looked great, but the 40-degree lens threw an abstract flower-like pattern.
Summary
Overall, I was impressed with this fixture. Its wide throw pattern and brightness could make it a powerful tool for a church with a more limited budget for LED wash fixtures. If a church isn't doing live video, the banding I saw would not matter. If you are doing video, I'd suggest getting one of these fixtures to evaluate and see if it would affect your video quality—it may not matter if you are simply using it as a stage wash.
It's an absolutely huge step up from many of the inexpensive fixtures out there. The stage in a smaller church could easily be completely washed with a small number of these fixtures.
So, while the fixture isn't perfect, you're not paying the $1,000+ typical for a “perfect” LED wash fixture. This fixture has excellent performance for the money, and is worth taking a look at.