List Price: $2,699
For those who have attended the annual LDI conference in Las Vegas, you know how the conference floor can be overwhelming with thousands of products emitting high intensity light through the ever-present fog and haze. After stumbling into the vast and beautifully designed Elation Professional booth, I was pleased to discover several exciting new products. One of the standout new products was the Fuze Wash Z350 LED moving light.
The Fuze Wash Z350 is a movable head wash luminaire that replicates a high-powered PAR spotlight. The Fuze Wash Z350 features a powerful 350W Quad Color RGBW COB LED, a wide motorized zoom that spots to 12 degrees and floods to 53 degrees, pan and tilt, RGBW color mixing, variable dimming curves, nifty strobe effects, and a complete set of features to handle current control protocols and applications.
We were so happy to hear that Elation Professional agreed to allow us to test the Fuze Z350 in our light lab and theaters at California State University Long Beach. Upon unpacking the fixture we could not help but notice the its unique lens system. Unlike almost any other lighting fixture on the market, the Fuze Wash Z350 features a large frosted lens that helps create the excellent optical characteristics noted below. The Fuze Wash Z350 is heavier than it appears, almost 45 pounds. However, the weight translates to a solidly built fixture that withstood our torture tests with flying colors.
Tests & Results
We first hooked up the Fuze Wash Z350 in our light lab to test its initial photometrics in a controlled environment. Elation Professional claims that the fixture produces 26,240 LUX 847 FC @9.8 feet (3m) (12 degrees Full ON) 1,672 LUX 40 FC @9.8 feet (3m) (53 degrees Full ON). Our tests found similar results, making the Fuze Wash Z350 powerful enough for most theatrical and house of worship applications.
We ran the fixture through a series of color, movement and optical tests. We found that the Fuze Wash Z350 met the benchmarks stated in its promotional material. What is most impressive is its beam and field consistency throughout its wide 12- to 53-degree zoom range. There were no strange optical aberrations during our zoom tests, and even at 53 degrees the Fuze Wash Z350 had no dark spots in its field. This is very impressive!
The Fuze Wash Z350 has superlative color mixing with no strange blotchiness of color (typical of too many LED wash fixtures).
When we spotted the Fuze Wash Z350 all the way in to 12 degrees, we found a very tight and powerful field of light with a beautiful soft edge. In fact, that soft edge is consistent throughout the entire zoom range. This makes the Fuze Wash Z350 ideal for color washes and mixing area washes with other fixtures—perfect for a stage wash in a worship environment.
I am continually amazed at the improvements in LED technology. So much of what is achieved is in the advanced software control of dimming and color mixing. The Fuze Wash Z350 has several user-selectable dimming curves that should cover just about any applicable theatrical and worship situation. It is important that you take the time to set this internal dimming curve accordingly. Otherwise, you may not be satisfied with the results. We found that once set correctly, the Fuze Wash Z350 responded with silky smooth, flicker-free dimming.
The Fuze Wash Z350 has superlative color mixing with no strange blotchiness of color (typical of too many LED wash fixtures). Its color pallet has a very wide range, including primary blue, green, and red colors as well as subtle tints. In addition, Elation has built into the fixture 64 color presets and 14 unique color macros. Regarding color correction, we were able to reproduce a range of 3,200 through 6,500 kelvin for relative white color balancing. In addition, the fixture’s color fading was smooth and didn’t take us through strange, undesired tints.
The fixture’s single source LED lamp did not produce multiple colored shadows (as typical of some other LED wash fixtures). In this respect, this fixture compares very well with other high-end LED wash units. The lamp has a 100,000-hour lamp life, which pretty much ensures that by the time the lamp dies we will all be cruising around in our Jetson flying cars.
The Fuze Z350 has a wide range of pan and tilt, allowing us to focus on any object under and across from it. We found the pan and tilt motors extremely fast, no doubt due to the Fuze Z350’s excellent weight balance on the yoke. The fixture easily passed our pan/tilt torture test (where we test the extreme limits of the motors). The fixture was also very quiet during all its movements, making it ideal for volume-sensitive applications such as theatres and houses of worship.
In real-time
After spending a week in our light lab, we put the Fuze Wash Z350 to work on one of our productions in the Studio Theater. We hung the fixture in the catwalks about 28 feet above the stage floor. The fixture delivered a bright, single source beam of light, emitting a strong wash of beautifully colored light across the entire thrust area of the stage. This allowed the designer to create a strong, single source wash of light for her design.
When testing new products we usually experience a surprise in the product’s capabilities. One of the most interesting surprises of the Fuze Wash Z350 occurred when we were testing its strobe effects. We found that the Fuze Wash Z350 has a wonderful pallet of strobes, including a very strong random strobe that is perfect for a lightning effect. The designer needed a strong lightning effect at the end of the show, so she assigned that effect to the Fuze Wash Z350. The LED wavelengths of the Fuze Wash Z350 reacted with the white paint on the floor of the set in such a powerful way that the painted image seemed to jump off the floor, making the last effect of the show much more impressive than if she used conventional arc-sourced moving light.
The Fuze Wash Z350 has a seven-button control panel with a deep but easily navigable menu system, DMX and RDM protocol support, multiple unit power linking, 3pin/5pin DMX and powerCON In/Out, four DMX Channel Modes (19 total channels), and a multi-voltage universal auto switching power supply (110-240v). The fixture is 16.3 inches (414mm) long, 11.6 inches (294mm) wide, 18.0 inches (461mm) high, and weighs 45 pounds (20.4 kg).
End analysis
The Fuze Wash Z350 is priced very aggressively (around $1,800 street). This makes it fit in with the budgets of most houses of worship. I can see purchasing a small number of Fuze Wash Z350s to cover most of the worship stage, offering almost unlimited colors with the ability to spot soloists. Its flicker-free and extremely quiet operation also makes it ideal for such sound-sensitive theatrical environments.
Along with its other new products (the Emotion line and the award winning Platinum FLX), Elation Professional should be very pleased with the Fuze Wash Z350. The fixture has an impressive set of features that is ideal for houses of worship. I highly recommend that you look at the Fuze line of fixtures. Once you add up the features the line offers, and look at the bottom line price of the fixtures along with the inherent money savings of LED technology, the Fuze Wash Z350 is hard to resist.
