Right out of the box you'll get the sense that the Elation Professional WW Profile Ellipsoidal feels like a very sturdy, professional grade lighting fixture. The exterior is solid and manufactured from durable, high quality materials. The shutters felt smooth and were easy to adjust. Our gobos and irises fit perfectly into the accessory slot. The gel frame was easy to clip on and off. The barrel moved smoothly into the body of the instrument, making focus adjustments easy and accurate. The yoke adjustment levers were solid and locked the fixture down tight with no pan or tilt slippage.
The fixture's thermal characteristics were very impressive. The body of the fixture stayed cool, even when running at full for several hours. Unlike a conventional tungsten halogen leko where it can get dangerously hot near the rear of the main body, the Elation Professional WW Profile Ellipsoidal reached only warm temperatures. The very quiet internal cooling fan helped keep the exterior of the fixture cool. This is especially important when you have students or volunteers focusing the lights (you never want to burn someone). Even the gobo stayed amazingly cool inside the fixture. This will help save you money as gobo burnout is a now a thing of the past.
This well designed lighting fixture has a 130W Warm White 3,000K LED engine. Typical of LED fixtures, the lamp life is an astonishing 50,000 hours. These fixtures were designed as a direct replacement for theaters and houses of worship that wish to move to a much more energy conscious stage lighting system.
Considering these requirements, we tested the Elation Professional WW Profile Ellipsoidal to see how close it matches with a typical tungsten halogen ellipsoidal reflector spotlight. We set up the WW Profile Ellipsoidal right next to one of our stock tungsten halogen lekos. Understand that this stock leko was several years old, so it is not a totally fair comparison. However, if you consider that most users will be integrating these fixtures with similarly aged stock lekos, it does make sense.
THE EXTERIOR IS SOLID AND MANUFACTURED FROM DURABLE, HIGH QUALITY MATERIALS.
INTO ACTION
The first test we performed was intensity. The Elation Professional WW Profile Ellipsoidal achieved a maximum intensity close to the 575W tungsten halogen fixture. But intensity does not tell the entire story. We found that the WW Profile Ellipsoidal produced a light with much more contrast, especially when using a gobo.
The next test was color rendering. Although many LED manufacturers claim that their “warm white” LEDs perfectly match the standard 3,200K lamp, you sometimes find that the match is further away than the specifications claim. I am sure you have seen this when you purchase LED lamps to replace your household fixtures. Cheap LEDs create a green/blue hue to skin tones, washing out the reds and pinks.
When comparing WW Profile Ellipsoidal with the standard 3,200K tungsten halogen leko we found the color of the flesh tones look identical.
The outstanding color consistency continued even when you placed gels into each fixture. We found that matching colors between this LED fixture and the traditional tungsten halogen throughout the spectrum were indistinguishable to the human eye.
But the true test of LED stage lighting fixtures has to be their dimming curves. Why is this important? In the theater we use our lighting fixtures in many dimming situations where there are slow fade-ins and fade-outs. Older LED fixtures could fade pretty smoothly from 100% to about 15%, but then started to flicker when lowering the intensities below that. They would also snap off somewhere between 3%-6%. This is not a good characteristic when creating subtle light cues.
We programmed 60-second cues that faded the intensity from 0%-100% and from 100%-0%. When running these cues we discovered that the Elation Professional WW Profile Ellipsoidal displayed a smooth curve all the way through the duration of the cues. It also closely matched the intensity of the tungsten halogen fixture next to it. However, one thing that the Elation Professional WW Profile Ellipsoidal did not do is reproduce amber shift at lower intensities. This may be a good or bad thing, depending on your personal opinion about color shift.
Considering all its features, maybe the best thing about the Elation Professional WW Profile Ellipsoidal is its cost. Street price is around $1,500. This will truly bring a competitive edge to the new world of LED lekos; and this is good news for us all.