Dimmer on tungsten

Yep, as long as the dimmer is rated for the wattage of the lights you'll be fine. You may experience buzzing depending on the dimmer (cheap ones buzz sometimes) and will have some color temp shift as you dim, but I find I can many times use this to my advantage or that its not noticeable enough to matter.
 
phudsontx said:
There is not a better option for the price than the Harbor Freight router speed controls.
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True. If anybody is interested, an engineer from Finland showed me how to adjust a pot inside so that they dim down almost to off. I'll see if I can find it.
 
Wow, I was just this morning going to spend twice as much on what looks like the same dimmer on eBay. Glad I checked here first!

Quick question, forgive my ignorance I'm new to the world of dimmers, the eBay ones said up to 1000w, but since this is 1800w could I use it on a 1200W HMI Fresnel? Do these also work on Kinos?
 
drcheese said:
Wow, I was just this morning going to spend twice as much on what looks like the same dimmer on eBay. Glad I checked here first!

Quick question, forgive my ignorance I'm new to the world of dimmers, the eBay ones said up to 1000w, but since this is 1800w could I use it on a 1200W HMI Fresnel? Do these also work on Kinos?
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I think the ones on eBay are exactly these router speed controls.

These dimmers will work only on tungsten heads. Since there isn't a tungsten globe I know of between 1000W and 2000W the other sellers are simply being conservative, I'd guess. I haven't tried it but I don't see why you couldn't connect 17 or 18 100W bulbs onto the same circuit and dim them all together with one of these. Nor can I think why you would want to do that.

Both fluorescents and HMIs use a piece of electronics called a ballast to produce the voltages, frequencies and currents that they respectively need because they cannot work on the 117V volts from the AC mains directly. These dimmers will not work with them and might damage them.

I have about ten of these dimmers and they are very useful. You know, of course, that dimmers lower the color temperature of the light -- it's warmer, more yellow. If you don't want that to happen, don't use a dimmer and use wire scrims in front of the light or if you can't afford those just get some .15 neutral density gel. Each layer will cut the light by 1/2 stop. Cheap and effective.
 
Yeah, I generally use scrims, but I need the dimmer for an effect in a project next week. I picked up 3 of them today. They worked ok with a 1k, but don't go all the way off which is annoying. If it works up to 1800 though I could connect two 650s and a 300 and have those lights to go up all together in sync, which is handy.

Thanks for the note on the HMI/Fluoros, I figured they wouldn't work with the ballasts, but sometimes you just take a stab in the dark to see what you might get.
 
1200 watt HMI's usually have a dimmer on the ballast. If they don't, you can always rent an electronic ballast for 50-100 bucks and use that for your HMI instead of your current ballast.

What kind of effect do you need to do? You can also use shutters if you need something very quick.

As far as dimming kino's....I think you can only do that if they're dmx controlled and you don't want to go too far, as they begin to get more magenta as they dim. You can also dim Diva's as their dimmer is built in, but other than that, it's just pretty tricky.
 
It's a music video and this band is traveling in a boat through different lands, eventually they get to a place which is the netherworld and red smoke surrounds them. It's all on a green screen besides the band and (maybe) the boat. I plan to pull up some red gelled lights with a dimmer as the red smoke overtakes them.

It's an all tungsten shoot and I don't need the HMI or Kino, was just curious. My HMI's electric ballast doesn't have a dimmer :( But yeah, rental would work if I need this in the future.
 
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