Why do HMI prices suck?

gco

gco

Veteran
Man, it is just totally disgusting how the prices of these lights are nowhere near reasonable. I mean you can actually buy a used car with an internal combustion engine, a suspension, a hydraulic transmission that automatically shifts gears and a computer-based electronic control system that controls the engine and the transmission for less money than a used 800w joker bug!!! I just watched one on ebay sell for 5100. THAT is just stupid. There is no freakin way the cost of manufacturing any of these lights justifies their retail prices. No how, no way, not even close. It's a bulb and a housing and an electronic power circuit (or a transformer with a pulse forming circuit). OK, maybe there is a glass lens and a cable that goes between the light and the ballast. The best I can figure is that the movie industry is so flushed with cash in their budgets that they have never cared what they pay for equipment and as a result a limited group of suppliers has locked into a certain strata. If somebody with stones would produce a tip-top quality daylight balanced light and sell it at a reasonable profit margin, say 100%, seems they could profit well and kick the entire manufacturing industry in the backside. Then again I aint in the industry so maybe I am missing something fundamental here but the situation just stinks. People like me and you should be able to just go out and buy one or two 800w or 1200w HMIs without getting a mortgage.
Maybe this is the wrong place for this but beautiful light is a beautiful thing especially if you like making beautiful images and you shouldn't have to be wealthy to buy one. With more and more people getting into independent film making, I think if more people could, more people would. Why can't the industry respond to that?
--end of rant.
 
HMI's run off of the tears of unicorns. Supply and demand.

My guess is because they require a moderately sophisticated ballast system and are a specialty item of sorts.

When I had a tour of Arri Burbank, I got to see a repair shop with a couple of HMI ballasts on the operating table. They are probably not as simple as you think! :)

HMI's are very special compared to other lights, they turn less energy into heat and more of it into light. That is why they are MUCH brighter when compared to equivalent wattage tungsten.

Cars also depreciate much faster then HMI's, lol.
 
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Ryan's right. It's supply and demand.

There are hundreds of thousands of buyers for a car, which means overheads are spread out, bringing the cost down.

The demand for a HMI (which is a specialist precision instrument) is much lower, therefore the overhead costs aren't spread around as much, inflating the price.

Somewhere there's a balance between keeping the price low enough to attract customers, but high enough to give a decent return to the manufacturer. The industry obviously thinks the current pricing structure is it.

But you never know. With the huge increase in Indie filmmakers due to the availability of high quality/low cost cameras, the price may come down. But since a lot of these new Indie filmamkers don't seem to be able to tell a light from a microphone ("This new camera's great! I just have to point and shoot!"), I wouldn't be holding my breath.

Cheers :beer:
 
Have you seen those mini DC HID arc headlamps for bicycles? It costs more than a bicycle itself. Only well-heeled cycling fetishists would buy them.

Everything to do with HMI light is expensive; a spare ballast to head cable costs a few hundreds dollars.

I think the future affordable daylight fresnel is the new ceramic technology. Arri's new Ceramic 250W fresnel can run on Philips 5400K 250W MSR bulb in theory (well Arri said nothing about this on their web site but Desisti ceramic 250W certainly can....one of the Desisti sale rep told me two years ago). 250W ceramic fresnel can provide output as much as a 1000W tungsten fresnel. This is a relatively new technology and the demand is small, mostly from television studio, theatre and architecture applications.

Now ceramic fresnel has built-in ballast and costs about half the price of HMI fresnel +ballast of similar power rating. If manufacturers start to make more powerful ceramic fresnels coupled with introduction of new daylight MSR bulbs to match them; something like 500W or 1kW Ceramic daylight MSR with built-in ballast would be very sweet. Again that's in my dream:) Meanwhile I have to be content with my Arri and Mole Richardson fresnels, putting up with the heat and worrying about tripping the household circuit breakers. Tungsten fresnels are sweet and they warm up the place nicely in cold climate england.
 
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That's what rentals are for my friend. It's not going to change. I bought a used Joker 1200 watt PAR from my rental house many years ago for $2,800.00. Used it for four years, then sold it on Ebay for $3,500.00 HMIs REALLY hold their value well.

Guys like Richard at Coollights want make HMIs cheaper, but I have not yet seen his HMIs become available really. It has to be tougher than we think to source the parts.

Dan
 
Hi Dan,

Some people actually are doing something about it. Its not vaporware and its not that they're not generally available--its that we've been wading into it at our own speed and with those "first" customers we thought were good ones for new products. We are doing our part and its happening at the speed we feel we can go.

If you're waiting for Arri, Mole or K5600 to lower their price you'll be waiting a long time. They are unsympathetic to that cause particularly since it is a small market for such a light and the market will pay that price. Even if there were a low cost alternative, Hollywood and the establishment media production would not switch for a long time. They are for the most part either corporate employees or contractors of large corporations. The old saying use to go "you never get fired for buying IBM." That was really a commentary on how corporate employees never go out on a limb for anything other than an established solution--why should they? They're spending other people's money so there's no reason to take a risk. It takes a large group spending their own money, and the pain involved with that, before you get change of some kind. That group has to first want something different and then finance people that are trying to provide a solution. If they aren't financing or doing their own solution, then they can't really whine and should just go and support the establishment and be happy. Business as usual.

There's also a great deal of ignorance about what HMI is and isn't too even among people that use it all the time. Ignorance and confusion tends to help keep costs high. Then people don't know about or understand alternatives. I've done my share of education on the subject and we've also tried to introduce some other metal halide products into the domain like with the CDM 150. That's been well accepted by 99% that have bought it. You can always find someone that won't like something though or won't understand it. Go over on some boards were "pros" hang out and they have no idea what CDM is, that its been out for a long time and in use in some products by Dedo, Altman, ETC and others and they really have no clue what's in a lot of the products they use or what an "HMI" really is.

The analogy of HMI to computers or cars though is not totally complete since it is a small market as someone else mentioned. We have hoped that with lowering the price that new volume would come in to create a market that wasn't there before or would-be customers that couldn't have used such a product before.
 
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Hi Richard:

I know that you have been on the search for quite a while and that you don't want to release your HMIs until you are satisfied that they will work for your users and meet your expectations. I agree, that's how most gear in our business works, everyone is a Lemming and conforms to industry standards. At times, the standards are pretty good, but as you know, often the industry standard is just because users are too conservative to think outside the box.

What are your present timelines for your 575 HMIs and your 1200 watt PAR? I know you have been looking for the right pieces, ballasts, etc. Any news on availability? Are you still considering a larger CDM light?

Dan
 
Seek and you shall find. But, they should add "as long as you don't give up" to that saying. Its not easy to do this and there isn't a ton of information out there to help someone. We've had a tough time to find techs capable of working on ballasts out there because power electronics is a dying art IMHO. Everyone likes to throw away these days and not fix. For something as complex and expensive as a 575/1200 ballast though, that's not really the best option.

The par 1200 is in stock and we've sold some units already through online ordering. We like the 575/1200 e-ballast that drives that and its out of test and performing well. We have several 1200w fresnels out there either running also on that ballast or on a cold start lower cost 1200w ballast. Probably a dozen 1200w units altogether. Those were all special requests by people that constantly contact me looking for a solution so we went ahead and accommodated.

We have about 50 575 fresnels out there running different type ballasts from the most expensive 575/1200 to the low cost models like a 575 110v only, 575 220v only and a 575 110/220v. They ranged in price from $699 for the 575 only's to $1699 for the 575/1200 model. That included everything they needed but the HMI bulb which we will continue to not stock for the time being since I can't find offer it at any lower prices than others are already.

There is at least one of the 575 110v only low cost fresnels right there in your own home city of L.A.

My timeline is sometime next year to roll out a 575 only fresnel. And hopefully we'll have the 575/1200 fresnel model in stock more often too rather than just for special requests. As you can imagine that would be great for someone that owned both the 1200w par and a 575w fresnel. Anyway, right now our production budgets are pretty taken up with LEDs, getting our portable flos back in stock and CDM fixtures.

We have a 70w CDM we're bringing out this time and I hope soon to have a 250w and 400w as well but that's been going slow with all the other things we have going on. The 70w looks like a 300w Arri sized compact fresnel with a ballast attached. You could attach our 150w CDM ballast and bulb in the 70w unit and have the 150w CDM in a smaller package too.

Having that entire CDM range will give someone the capability to completely cut hot lights out of their kit if they want to without going to a real HMI or "flo-only kit", but still getting most of the benefits of HMI and hard light. We'll probably just put the 250 CDM in the 650w sized fresnel and the 400w in the 1000w sized fresnel. Those will use the Philips / Osram type semi-HMI bulbs with GY9.5 and GX9.5 sockets respectively. The life will be in the 1000 hour range. I had hopes for a while for another type of 250w bulb but the problem is that if you deviate from standards then someone can only get the bulb from you. We've tried to generally use bulb form-factors you can get elsewhere than from us. It's super tempting though to have a great bulb engineered to solve some of the issues but I have to keep reminding myself that it would be proprietary and people wouldn't like that long term--regardless of the benefits.

For the time being, those CDM, cold start ballasts are a bit less involved then the full-fledged HMI ballasts so can be offered at lower cost and also seem to end up being quieter too. The higher wattage's from about 400w on up will all have some kind of noise of one type or another in the head. Its a function of the wattage intensity plus the frequency involved in driving the bulbs. And some bulbs seem noisier than others. An Osram is about the best I've found. We wanted to introduce some Taiwanese HMI clone bulbs but unfortunately they're the noisiest and while I can use them some feel they were too much so we'll skip those for now. The ballasts themselves are pretty darn silent with at most a whisper fan now. The 250w will probably be our most silent unit of all.

In general though, on this issue of sound if I can't use it in my tests, I wouldn't even market it. We've rejected a lot of potential solutions as being unworkable because of sound. And a lot of people agree with me on noise levels too. You'll find at least one or two in any group of fifty though that are too sensitive to noise, they focus on that and consider its not for them. If someone really wants to give up renting, needs an HMI of their own and views the shortcomings like that as small, compared to the conveniences they gain, then it won't be a problem for them. I never find it to be a problem personally. I use all my own lights and only build things I would use personally and that's been a great formula for making things that don't last on the shelf long.
 
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"Why do HMI prices suck?"

They do?I bought 3 1200 HMI fresnels this year and the clients don't complain about the prices of the rentals. :huh:

Seriously, I believe its because of the limited "RENTAL MARKET" of the lighting itself.

Actually HMI lighting is kinda cheap when compared to some speciality lighting such as plasma or some other types of custom light sources available...

One could argue that tungsten sources at your hardware store are to expensive when compared to prices of candles, that being it is a subjective question overall.






 
AFJJ said:
"Why do HMI prices suck?"
They do?I bought 3 1200 HMI fresnels this year and the clients don't complain about the prices of the rentals. :huh:
Seriously, I believe its because of the limited "RENTAL MARKET" of the lighting itself.
Actually HMI lighting is kinda cheap when compared to some speciality lighting such as plasma or some other types of custom light sources available...
One could argue that tungsten sources at your hardware store are to expensive when compared to prices of candles, that being it is a subjective question overall.
Click to expand...

Oh Yes, they most definitely do. Terribly so. One single 575 Arri Par sells for $8k? Come on. The rental market is not relevant here. It all goes back to the cost of manufacturing vs. market price. There is just no way the cost of manufacturing these housings, ballasts, and cables comes close to justifying the retail price on these lights. As I mentioned before you can purchase something far more complex with respect to design, engineering and manufacturing complexity for the same money (not considering respective markets). The technology associated with power supply and regulation has been with us a very long time. I think that the current situation has to do with the birth of the industry, i.e. a limited group of suppliers and limited group of buyers with enough in their budgets not to care about those prices. As a result things have locked in place and a club mentality is born. A few are actually defending these prices. As Richard, mentioned earlier--corporate mentality, well that certainly supports this idea. Thing is, demand is increasing with the advent of independent film making but the old line industry does not appear to be doing anything to address this new group of consumers. For whoever is willing to break this trend with a quality product, I wish them all the best. No doubt the market will respond well. It's time for that log jam to burst.
 
Ummm...these companies also have to make a profit. Yes, an HMI may not cost $8k to make, but the market is fairly small when you consider other markets. Plus, Arri/Mole/LTM/Desiti/etc all make gear that LASTS. I've got a decent amount of gear that is at least as old as me and some older that works as good as the day it was made. If they didn't charge a decent amount for it they would go out of business. An Arri HMI will last 10-20 years with simple repairs. The ballast is the main thing that will need to be repaired and they still are fairly bulletproof.

I've got two of Ricahrd's 1200 HMI's and while I love them, they are not Arri's. Of course what I paid for 2 was less than one Arri, but they would not be very suitable (currently) for a rental house (no offence Richard!)

Matthew
 
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