For all the times I have spent at IBC and BVE one LED manufacturer stood out from the crowd…GEKKO. Last week I proudly bought a Kelvin TILE from a great promotion CVP were running, I finally owned a UK manufactured LED Bi-coloured light for £480 with “V” lock or £420 without “V” lock.
I am a big fan of cable free lighting so the “V” lock version was a no brainor for me.
The Kelvin TILE is not only a video light that ranges from 2200K to 6500K but you also have a film preset as well. With DMX control the Kelvin TILE also gives you the unique ability to turn your Bi-colour LED light into a light of many colours.
Using a “Gekko Paintbox” it’s easy to dial in any colour you fancy but if the best part of £500 does not sway you to part with your cash you can also use a laptop or in my case a MacBook Air with a £130 Enttec USB PRO DMX box and download a free DMX control app from the Apple APP store and control the Kelvin TILE for £130 plus a 2m 5pin XLR DMX cable for about £25.
The Karess lite 6006 is a very powerful 5600K LED light that out performs all but none of my cheaper Chinese LED lights for sheer light output alone and makes a great bounce light for my Canon C300.
Both the Karess and Kelvin lights are built to last with heat sink frames that are admittedly a lot heavier than the cheaper LED lights but it also has an air of quality not a word you can pin onto the plasticky LED lights from China.
Gekko are built in the UK and I look forward to showing off the best of British in my User Review Video next week.
You can use normal 3 Pin XLR audio extensions for DMX quite effectively on small rigs. It’s a shame the manufacturers didn’t put 3pin XLRs on the back instead. I have a setup of over DMX units – ParCans and Mirror Scanners. Its never missed a beat, just be sure to properly terminate the DMX.
And please compare this unit to the 512as unit you’ve also reviewed. It’d be great to know how they compare. Thanks
Ah DMX my other field. The Entec kit is very good (I have both) but for just a couple of lights for a video rig you would be just fine with the more basic £45 ish OpenDMX rather than £100 Pro model.
I can’t find the channel mappings for the Gekko lights but you could also most likely use the simple £40 6 channel + master battery powered desks, you need 3 channels for RGB so you can map 2 lights to the desk, colour balance each then use the master fader to control overall brightness.
DMX fixtures also remember their last settings so the simple desk you can just plug in, configure and then unplug.
I’m not surprised at the use a 5 pin XLR as that’s the DMX standard, 3 pin connectors while common on DJ level kit are not standards compliant. That’s why all the Enttec kit is 5 pin. Unfortunately the prevelance of 3pin kit has hampered the deployment of the more advanced RDM protocol that would have used the 2 dormant pins. But yes always always spend the couple of quid on a terminator.
Alternative cross platform (Linux/Mac/Windows) free open source control software that works well with the Enttec kit is Q-Light (http://www.opendmx.net/index.php/Q_Light_Controller_(QLC))