ETC's passionate investment is an indication of the importance of the technology and is providing huge momentum to the acceptance of sine wave across the entertainment lighting market. ETC Chief Executive Officer Fred Foster said: "IES was the pioneer behind sine wave dimming technology in Europe. At the same ETC has been developing sine wave products in the US. With the acquisition of IES, we've had the unprecedented opportunity to unite the best people and ideas in the field and create sine wave solutions for the worldwide lighting market."
IES iSine dimming technology is not only silent but provides an alternative 'green' solution by virtually eliminating harmonic distortion and minimising reactive power, plus benefiting from lower volt drop. Other benefits reported by users include energy savings and reduction in electricity costs, improved lamp-life for savings on maintenance and, thanks to that reduced volt drop, less heat dissipation. iSine also saves on infrastructure costs through the downsizing of cables, switchgear and transformers. Additionally, iSine dimming has proved tolerant of the poorest mains supply conditions and is easily able to accommodate generator supplies as well as controlling all popular light sources, including HMI.
ETC also used PLASA to introduce the SmartFade compact lighting console, which offers professional quality control solution first time users, educational establishments and amateur groups. SmartFade has three operating modes: Two Preset, Normal and DMX Backup. For novice or first-time users, the simple two-preset mode provides a small, easy to operate 12 or 24 channel, two-preset console with a manual or timed cross fade section, bump buttons with master and a grand master. Normal mode is designed for more experienced users, providing 48 or 96 channels with 288 or 576 memories and 48 sequences. The DMX512 input facility enables SmartFade to be used as a replacement for ETC's Reflection backup console, providing seamless and sophisticated backup for any DMX512 lighting console and ensuring that the show does indeed go on. In this mode, the unit provides 23 or 47 backup looks of 512 channels each, with backups recorded as dimmer snapshots.
Also shown at PLASA by ETC were the latest console development from Avab - the Congo - and Avab's latest Safari software upgrade. "Congo has been designed to be the most complete theatre and moving light hybrid - without losing the feel of a classic lighting control system," according to Avab software developer Anders Ekvall.
(Lee Baldock)
