DJ lighting advice needed

[whines]

First up to buy are wash lights. Any recommendation on specific lights i should be considering?

Lights with the big 3w+ LED's are great. The newest ones combine the LED's behind the lens so you don't have the RGB grid look, like

http://www.chauvetlighting.com/slimpar-tri-7-irc.html

or if you perfer going with chinese knockoffs

http://www.monoprice.com/Product?c_id=1 ... 1&format=2

These are examples, not specific reccomendations. Most of my PARs were from no-name vendors on Ebay or Aliexpress and I've had a good sucess rate with them, but now that Monoprice is getting in the biz I intend to go with them since they have good customer service.

Note that the ones with higher powered LEDs often have fans and sometimes they are pretty loud--varies hugely by model. Irrelevant for DJs, annoying for churches.

There are some coming out now that have red, green, blue, white, amber and UV behind each lens...I'm excited by that, no more carrying around separate lights for UV if you do the DJ thing!

[Gauss]

I'd like to know more from users of the DMX controllers too then please.

I thought that, while yes, controllers have 256 channels (as DMX does), that doesn't neccessarily mean you have sufficient ability to run, eg only, say more than 5 fixtures on a base model, because it takes up "memory" so to speak.

I see some controllers stating they will control 10 fixtures.
AS long as you only use 2 or three DMX aspects of each light/fogger blah blah blah.

But if you have 10 scanners and want to use all the DMX features, forget it...

You're right, the controllers do limit the number of fixtures with their quality. I found the manual for my controller to refresh my memory. http://www.chauvetlighting.com/products ... _ML_WO.pdf It can take 12 fixtures, with 16 channels each. It doesn't actually use channels over 192. I didn't know that, I've only used 5 fixtures. I double up sometimes, when I want two to do the same thing (i.e. they get the same address.) I hooked up a ADJ megapixel panel with configurable 3/8/16/18? channels. It bled over into the other fixture when I set it on 18 or whatever number it had. I didn't like the way that light changed colors so abruptly.

Chauvet Colorstrip and Colorstrip minis seem like the best bang for buck still.

[Grant Bunter]

Thanks Gauss,
At least for me (and Baja) I will have to explore if or what limitations there may be with software based systems...

[CoronaOperator]

I hooked up a ADJ megapixel panel ... I didn't like the way that light changed colors so abruptly.

That would be the controller's fault, not the light. To get a smooth fade with the Obey40, one has to program then select a chase, then you can adjust the fade time with the fader. One can also program the 8 scenes, select music or auto trigger and also use the fade time fader to get a smooth fade. Just selecting a scene button will make abrupt changes. It's a very basic controller. I have some color changers that when you select blackout with the controller, it will scroll though all the colors before it blacks out, very annoying.

[Gauss]

I mean the Megapanel's preprogrammed chases flash really abruptly. I thought it was subtly annoying compared to the Colorstrip chase. I wasn't using the controller's automatic scene-change timer.