Trust these HMIs? And where to buy?

Well said, David Jones and Policar. I'm a very big fan of the M18 also, it has phenomenal punch. I've had it in situations where it actually equaled a 6K par in output. But it is dodgy to try to power off household--industrial outlets can usually handle it but residential ones are hit and miss. Also worth looking at the Joker 1600 as it can manage this issue well. For what it's worth: I can buy either of those tomorrow if I wanted to, and have been tempted to do buy into higher end lighting gear for years but I always stop short when I consider the length of payoff, the size of the gear, transporting it, maintenance, bulb costs etc. I own a couple of Arri kits, some LED and a little fluorescent gear. If I'm doing a little project of my own, it's indeed nice to have. Only the LED stuff has ever earned me a rental on jobs (rental houses don't even carry it).

Also worth considering is co-owning gear. I used to do that when capital was harder to come by and it's a good way to soften the blow and still have access to it for your own stuff.
 
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The cheap chinese HMI may have a place and use for someone but just make sure you only ever bring your HMIs on shoots with proper insurance and where they have the budget to eat the cost of a $300 bulb. Otherwise you are out $300 for the bulb and worse your cheap HMI might malfunction and not work or worse still might hurt someone due to poor design or build or even just misuse. Also, plan to carry a spare bulb with you. I can relate to the desire to want to have the option of an HMI even on shoots where budget is tight and I'm supplying most of the gear, but in the end it never made sense for me. If you run your own rental house or own a ton of equipment and can do your own maintenance it might make sense to start acquiring HMIs, but I'd be very careful.
 
Another thing to consider carefully is the quality of the ballasts. I recently came very close to purchasing a "Lightstar" 1.2k HMI, which has really solid construction and is a light I've rented several times from different providers and had a great experience with - however we rented one again for a little indie feature I'm shooting at the moment, and though it worked as well as ever on household sockets, when it came to night exterior shoots where we had to run it off a generator, the light just would not stay on for more than a minute. Due to our remote location we lost a night's shooting due to that technical snafu, and ended up hiring a gaffer to come in with an Arri 1.2k and a more powerful gennie the following night - and the Lightstar couldn't get it up on that generator either! (costing us half of a second night's scenes!).

So buyer beware. And don't buy anything you can't test out beforehand.
 
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