
Originally Posted by
colouredmirrorball
A QM2k will work with LSX, though it's insanely expensive.
From what I hear on the forum, Beyond might be better for live use, but it's an order of magnitude more expensive than LSX. Even without having experience with Beyond, I dare say the price/quality ratio is much higher than LSX, simply because of its ridiculous cost!
I'm a heavy LSX user. It's great in multiple ways, and once you get the hang of it, you'll appreciate the freedom it gives you to do things. The caveat here is, "once". I admit it takes some time to get used to the software. There is a learning curve, and some people get stuck in the middle. You need to spend some time to fully discover how you can use the software in the way you want. I think this is the reason it isn't very popular by professionals: you need to spend time learning it, and use your brain power, while with QS it's more random button mashing (not sure how Beyond works, so see what others say). Another reason might be of course, the professionals all have Pangolin, but they locked up their hard & software in such a way to not allow any other package being used simultaneously, and no one wants to swap their already existing, very expensive kit with some new software that might look a bit scary :P
Maybe a good middle way is Fiesta/Moncha? Their hardware is compatible with LSX, and their software is easier to use. Though of course, it won't work with an etherdream.
Regarding stability, in my experience LSX is very stable software. It rarely crashes, and when it does, it's during show design. I have never witnessed a crash during an actual show. I could let it run for eight hours straight without any problem. It's also very fast to start up, takes little memory, and depending on what you do with it, processor requirements aren't high. I recommend a multi core machine, as LSX will spread out tasks across cores. I noticed that during a temporary freeze-up, for example when you load in all the installed fonts, the laser output will continue to run smoothly.