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ElektraLite Stingray Profile | $1,299
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The development of LED stage lighting has reached a point where it now makes economical sense to make the change from tungsten halogen. Many manufacturers have introduced LED Lekos to the marketplace. However, the price point has been very high (close to $2,000). Over the past two years the price has been coming down, bringing the price point of LED Lekos within reach of even modest theater companies and houses of worship.
With a CRI rating of 95, the Stingray ranks near the top of the scale. This is especially important for skin tones in video applications.
Last month CPM presented a “First Look” article featuring elektraLite’s new Stingray Profile LED ellipsoidal reflector spotlight. This fixture enters a very competitive market segment that includes products from several leading lighting fixture manufacturers. ElektraLite sent us a new Stingray Profile to test in our theaters and laboratories at California State University Long Beach in Long Beach, Calif. We promptly put it on a show and tested it over a three-week period.The Stingray Profile is designed around a highly efficient 300-watt COB LED that produces an output of 9,655 lumens at a color temperature of 3,200 kelvin with a color rendering index (CRI) rating of 95. CRI is the industry accepted measurement of how well a light source renders true color. Since 100 is considered the top of the CRI scale, a CRI of 95 is an excellent rating. This is especially important for skin tones under video. For houses of worship that incorporate IMAG into their services, this is a critical consideration. Upon unpacking the Stingray Profile we discovered a fixture that is extremely well made. The housing felt very solid and all the moving parts, including the shutters, barrel, rotating barrel, and tilt and pan levers, felt very solid. All these observations lead to a determination that the Stingray Profile would be a high quality, professional lighting fixture.
Hands on
Unlike most of its competitors, the texture of the fixture’s housing is a silky smooth hard polymer. This material makes the Stingray Profile feel and look quite contemporary. The Stingray Profile is also a bit slimmer, smaller and lighter than many of its competitors. This is a welcome development since typical LED Lekos have a very long back end. And this makes it difficult to use LED Lekos for high sidelight because you have to hang the fixture further away to clear the fixture in front of it. With its shorter length, the Stingray Profile allows you to hang fixtures closer to each other, thus allowing you to hang more fixtures on a pipe.
The optical system in the Stingray profile uses a proprietary diffraction lensing system that provides a powerful field of light in several lens configurations. Although shipped with a 19-degree lens, the Stingray Profile is also available with 26-, 36- and 50-degree lenses. The fixture is very bright. It held its own next to a 575W ETC Source Four. We tested the field and beam consistency and found a smooth, flat field with only minor imperfections. We were able to sharpen to the shutters as well as to a gobo. There were no strange optical artifacts present in the lighting field.
The fixture is very bright. It held its own next to a 575W ETC Source Four.
Our critical dimming tests resulted in no stepping or flickering through the dimming curve. We were able to create very slow fade-outs, similar to much more expensive LED lighting fixtures. The Stingray Profile does not simulate amber shift as the light dims. This will not be an issue if you are mixing Stingray Profiles with other LED fixtures or arc moving lights. However, if you are mixing the Stingray Profile with incandescent fixtures, there will be a color mismatch as the lights dim. On the other hand, keeping the color consistent as the fixture dims is actually preferable to most designers, and the Stingray Profile accomplishes this. We shot a video of the light dimming and found some slight flickering below 10%. We spoke with a member of Elektralite’s engineering team about our findings and learned that a recent software update addressed the flickering issue—an update our early production unit had not received.
We placed the Stingray Profile next to a reference Leko with a 3,200-kelvin tungsten halogen lamp. We found very little difference in both the color temperature between the two. Understand that CRI is based on either the color of sunlight or an incandescent lamp. In both cases, the color spectrum is very wide, allowing colors to reflect their natural wavelengths. For years LEDs have suffered from relatively low CRIs. With the advent of complex color tuning LEDs, we are now seeing CRIs in the mid 90’s. The Stingray Profile has this type of light engine, which makes its integration into existing lighting inventories of tungsten halogen lamps almost seamless. The rear panel features a simple onboard control interface. The Stingray Profile is controlled by only one intensity channel through a five-pin DMX input. The fixture can also be controlled through a console-free static control. DMX connections feature IN and THRU, allowing daisy-chaining of control data. The power cable is a Powercon In and Out, also allowing you to daisy-chain power to adjacent fixtures. Total power consumption is 400W. The Stingray Profile is multi-voltage using AC 100-250V. The fixture weighs only 18 pounds and measures two feet in length.
Real-world testing
We put the Stingray Profile into a production to see how it performed in a real-world environment. My student designer decided to use the fixture as a source for an I-Cue, which essentially made it a moving light. The I-Cue fit perfectly into the Stingray Profile’s gel frame slot. The extra weight of the I-Cue tested the strength of the Stingray Profile’s tilt mechanism lock. We had no problems with the Stingray Profile losing its focus throughout the three-week run of the show. This is a testament of the high quality design and materials elektraLite used for this fixture. As mentioned in my earlier article, the Stingray Profile features a liquid cooled heat sink, also used in some very sophisticated LED moving lights. This keeps the fixture cool and allows for longer lasting gobos and shutters. Upon inspection and use in real-world applications, we found the liquid cooled heat sink very effective. We never found the fixture too hot to handle and focus. Plus, the Stingray Profile is virtually silent.Houses of worship all over the world are considering replacing their old tungsten halogen lighting fixtures with LED.
Technology has reached a point where this can happen without losing the high quality of light that tungsten halogen provides. LED technology also allows you to build a much more cost efficient lighting system that is environmentally friendly, requires much less maintenance, and requires a much simpler, and cheaper power and data distribution system. If your church is looking to move into LED, we highly recommend that you consider elektraLite’s Stingray Profile. You may find that the Stingray Profile is the perfect match for your needs.
