Does anyone know what the best solution is for portable black light wash lighting? IMO, the only black light that truly looks good is fluorescent.
Does anyone know what the best solution is for portable black light wash lighting? IMO, the only black light that truly looks good is fluorescent.
I agree, fluorescent looks way better than LED when it comes to blacklight. I used four of these Elation UV washes on a gig. The room was probably about 1500 sq ft, and I had to turn two of them off because it was too bright. I sometimes see them a little cheaper than on this site.
http://www.stagespot.com/cgi-bin/sho...FYNM4Aodo3CTlw
UV Cannons 400w Discharge Lamp do a cracking job for washing ?
like...
http://www.soundlightuk.com/shop/pro...ood-Light.html
If you really have money to spend on blacklights:
http://wildfirefx.com
Cool, thanks for the help everyone!
I've heard bad things about those, but good things about Elation UV wash, as best bang for the buck.
- instinct
I'll tell ya. For the price, I find you can't go wrong going to Home Depot or Lowes and buying a 48" shoplight fixture and two 40 watt blacklight bulbs. Grand total is about $38 and they work as good as most things I've seen out there. I can cover a 3500 square foot area pretty well with 4 of them. They're readily available almost much anywhere if one breaks or you need an additional one. And, for $10 you can get a wire cover to protect the bulbs from revelers if they're at floor level. Chauvet has an LED panel called the Shadow that has a nice throw - out to about 45 feet but, it's not truly a blacklight. I think they can be had around $150. I did a side by side comparison with the shoplight rig and the shoplight only threw to about 35 feet but the light quality is better. The 400watt UV "cannons" still use a lot of wasted energy and don't throw terribly far either.
Just my $.02
I've thought of doing that, myself, but using Wildfire's Sable lamps. The lamps are about $27 each, but the intensity is nuts and they have a very long life (rated for 8,000 hours). It still ends up being half the price of the Elation, but the upside of the Elation is that it's very small at about 1/4 the size of a shoplight and the output is tremendous. It certainly hits 50 feet. I'd probably go with the Elations simply for the convenience of hauling them around, plus I can put them in between my intelligent lights on a truss. And if you're charging $15/fixture, even if you only get 800 hours out of the Elation's lamp (rated for 1,000 hours) figure 10 hours per rental, you're still ending up with 80 rentals before changing the bulb, or $1200 per fixture over the lamp's life. And they just look pro.