Altman Lights?

SomewhereinLA

SomewhereinLA

Well-known member
I was looking at maybe getting an Arri 650 fresnel or open faced.
Altman lights look exactly like a copy of Arri's at half the price. Can anyone comment on the quality of those lights? I don't really have much experience with anything but Arri and Mole lights.

cheers.
 
SomewhereinLA said:
I was looking at maybe getting an Arri 650 fresnel or open faced.
Altman lights look exactly like a copy of Arri's at half the price. Can anyone comment on the quality of those lights? I don't really have much experience with anything but Arri and Mole lights.

cheers.
Click to expand...

Hi:

This is not a true statement. The Arri 650 fresenel sells for $307.00 at www.bhphotovideo.com The Altman 650 fresenel sells for $284.00. Not exactly half.

Altmans are just Arri knockoffs and if they were really half the price of the same Arri, I would own them. But for just a few bucks more, better support and better prestige with clients possibly, I would go for Arris. I own 8 of them.

Dan
 
Indeed they are...my bad. All the lights I personaly own are Arri's as well. I never heard about Altman before, and was wondering if anyone had experience with them.
 
I've used the Altman hot 1ks and babys. They're nice fixtures. If they were really 25 - 50% less, they'd be really big.

It wasn't that long ago that Arri wasn't a name in lighting - at all. Even more recently that Arri almost walked away from studio lighting completely because they thought their market share was too little.

Anyway...

e
 
Thanks, when I priced the Arri 650 in my head, that was with screens , barndoors,bulb etc... For some strange reasons I sought all of that was included in the Altman price. Again, my bad. :beer:
 
I picked up a used Altman 650L last year, in perfect condition, for $200. It's a really nice fixture. If you can find a good deal on them, they're great.
 
The Arris are great but I also really like the Moles, I only own two, a tweenie and mighty. Something more old Hollywood about them.

If you want to see a really cool doc about Moles, I produced a short piece last year on the Harold Lloyd Comedy Collection for New Line. We went to Mole Richardson and did a whole piece on lighting back in the silent days. We shot in Moles lighting museum and it was very cool and very fun.

We also did some comparison test with hand cranked motion picture cameras that were really fun to shoot and watch.

Check it out if you are a silent film fan, the Harold Lloyd films are close to undiscovered, he was so overshadowed by Chaplin and Keaton but his films are almost as good and he made a lot more money than either of them, he was more popular in the 1920s. He made so much money that by the time talkies came in, he made a few, then retired. He didn't need the money when Hollywood wanted to put his films on this new-fangled television thing so there were about two or three generations that basically didn't remember Harold Lloyd while Keaton and Chaplin were always shown on television in the 50s and 60s.

He owned all of his own negatives and kept them in a film vault at his estate, Green Acres in the hills of Beverly Hills. You should see them, many of them look like brand new films that were just shot because the negatives were so pristine.

Anyway, oh yeah, lighting, weren't we talking about lighting?

Dan
 
Just got a BHPhoto catalog today and there is a really good kit by Altman called the CommPac Tungsten 4-Light Kit @ $1889.

The equivalent Mole Richardson kit is the Tweenie/Betweenie @ $2869, which actually includes one 1k openface Mickey. That's a big difference for very comparable packages.

Arri has the D4 - more of an assortment, but generally a comparable kit @ $2313.

The Altman kit even includes at least two of the four required globes to get you up and running.

e
 
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altmans are great lights. having used both arri's and altmans extensiveley, I would say that the are on the same level.
 
In STL Arri is the standard light that we see and use on almost any location setup... for some reason when budgets are higher (like for actual films) and/or studio shoots... I see a lot more of the Moles. I had a couple of Mole Tweenie IIs a couple of years ago and I didn't really appreciate them at the time.

If I were buying lights today I'd have a hard time deciding... I do think Arri carries a little more street cred then most other lights, but I don't know that they deserve any special consideration in reality. The Mole fresnels I had didn't have the best mechanism for focusing... if you're getting fresnels then you should expect to adjust beam focus a lot... the Mole really let me down in this area... it just felt clunky and not-precise.

The Arri feels better but I have mixed feelings about Arri's shell construction. The flat aluminum plates look nice but they don't vent heat off as well as some of the more open designs. One thing that I did like about the Moles was that they would cool down very quickly because of the shell design... when handling the light I would get the feeling that they could be potentially fragile because of the feel of it... at least in comparison to the Arris... but at this point (after playing with a lot of Arris and seeing some of them getting knocked around...) I would guess the Moles to be at least as durable as any other light... with the focusing mechanism being one of two caveats. The other thing about Moles that looks awesome... is the way light spills out of the shell... the design appears to be the most high-tech light on the planet with the way some light comes out of the venting design... and that is ALSO my other complaint... on any normal shoot I doubt this little glow around the fixture would be a problem... but something about light spill at the fixture really bothers me. Sometimes I have to clip on some blackwrap to hide a backlight or other light that is reflecting in something shiny... this could potentially be more of a problem with the Moles then other fresnels.

I agree that the Altmans look tempting... at this point in my little AV journey I don't think about gear image any more. Lighting a set properly is what you see on the tape, not what you see on the set. Sure you don't want to show up with some total garbage and look like a total amature, but any normal light of a given category shouldn't harm your street cred. I wouldn't hesitate to buy an Altman... I'm back in the fresnel marketplace myself right now.

Finally I want to say that DeSisti has the smoothest and most precise focusing mechanism that I've used in a fresnel... It's too bad that they're all steel construction or I may give them a place in my kit... but steel in a hot light bugs me... how long is it gonna' take to cool down?

So there. Did I muddy the waters up any? Bottom line is if the Altman looks good to you then why not try it out... there are things I like and dislike about all of the fresnels... but it does the jobs other lights won't... so you gotta' have 'em in the kit. If you set up a nice frame then nobody is really gonna' care which brand you choose.
 
truly, the altmans are fine lights. they are comparable to arris and thier 350 is sweet and cheap. for a 650 i prefer the ltm, and for a small light i love the pepper 150 and the mole in-betweenie. I really think that you can have all sorts of brands in your kit.
 
After looking through the Altman website, I didn't see any softboxes. What do you recommend that is affordable? What will fit them?
 
soft boxes arent brand-specific. all you need a a speed ring and a softbox that fits it. of course, chimeras are the best, but there are others that are cheaper.
 
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