ETC fos/4 Panels

Eric Coughlin

Eric Coughlin

Veteran
These lights look interesting. From ETC, the company that makes the long time popular Source 4 lights. They come in three sizes.

Large: 1600w, 25.4" x 25.4", 78.92 lb, $9800
Medium: 1000w, 25.4 x 17.4", 56 lbs, $6800
Small: 475w, 32 lbs, 25.4" x 9.3", $4700

Compared to the Arri Skypanels...

S360-C: 1500w, 50.4" x 34.4", 105.1 lbs (including ballast), around $20k
S60-C: 450w, 25.4 x 11.8", 37.5 lbs (including ballast), $5,895.00


So the Arri S360-C is twice the price, almost twice as large, 100w lower power, and 37 lbs heavier, with lower color quality. I personally prefer a smaller surface area since it's easier to manage a smaller light and a smaller light can always be diffused with larger sources. Unless they're hiding a ballast, the ballast appears to be built in with the ETC lights, for better or for worse. Generally speaking if the weight of handling a light is managable I prefer a built-in ballast. The medium and large lights, while having a surface area small enough for one person to handle, are a bit heavy for a single person to handle easily.

They have a five year warranty, 10 year warranty on the bulbs, and are likely well built by a reputable company.


 
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The way they talk about red is both obvious and also really interesting meaning these lights could be significantly better than many/all other leds.
 
These sound great. The form factor looks nice and manageable too.

The beauty of the S360 Skypanel is that it's actually large enough to key from directly (in many circumstances) without having to add further fabrics in front of it. That's actually a big deal. It does demand a lighting crew of a particular size though, the 2x2 ETC are offering (assuming it can match the S360's output from a similar powerdraw won't have that same capacity - but it'll also pack a bunch of output into a much more portable formfactor - which could be a big deal.
 
The red is awesome. But the real test for me is daylight. I’d like to see their spectral distribution chart when outputting daylight and their SSI rating for that. That seems to be the one area where LEDs continue to lag behind HMI’s.
 
Another thing to note is that the blue end of the spectrum looks like it's only a 1/4 to a 1/3 more bright than green and yellow, and they made the red end of the spectrum match or exceed the blue end. On most LEDs, the blue end is so much more overwhelming than everything else - often over 100% more bright.

Also, skintones need the far-red spectrum to reproduce them properly. Hence the reason why we had ND problems for years. (Cameras need to let in far red, traditional NDs don't block that end of the spectrum well, colors get polluted, but blocking far red proportionally solves the problem.)

The skintones look really nice on that video.
 
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