As a lighting designer and programmer I have been a long time user of Jands Vista consoles, however, I have never used a Microsoft Surface Tablet with the Jands Vista Software, so this was a completely new experience for me.
The Surface tablet I used for this review was a Microsoft Surface Pro 3 with a 12-inch touch screen, Intel 1.9 GHz Dual-Core i5 processor, Windows 8.1 Pro 64-bit operating system, 8 GB ram, 256 GB solid state drive, keyboard cover, stylus, and a docking station, with a total street price of approximately $1,800. This was paired with a Jands Vista M1 control surface, a 128-channel license dongle (which is a USB device), and Jands Vista 2.3 software installed on the tablet. List price on this Vista setup is $1,395.
What You Get
The first thing I noticed out of the box is that the Surface Tablet is much smaller and lighter than my 13-inch laptop. However, when you add the docking station it gets slightly larger and a little bit heavier, but still it's a smaller setup than the 13-inch laptop.
While the docking station does add a bit of extra size, it gives you a stand, an Ethernet port, three USB 3.0 ports, two USB 2.0 ports, a mini display monitor port, as well as an audio input and output, and a power connection for running the Surface Tablet from standard wall power. The keyboard case gives you a full keyboard as well as a track pad, which is integrated into a case that covers the touch screen of the Surface Tablet.
I think the keyboard cover and docking station are great additions to the system and, personally, I wouldn't want to use it without both. The keyboard makes naming functions and data input faster as well as giving you all of the Vista shortcut keys. The docking station gives you a solid stand that holds the tablet securely, USB ports for both the license dongle, as well as the console, which interfaces to the tablet via USB, as well as a nice clean power connection. Without the docking station you would be required to use a powered USB hub to attach the dongle and console since the Surface Tablet has only one USB 3.0 port on it. Also, you would have to deal with the power cable or run off battery power.
If you are looking for a compact lighting control system, especially one with touch screen capability, then Jands Vista running on the Microsoft Surface Pro 3 is definitely worth some serious consideration.
Greg Persinger
Reviewer.
Into Use
Setup of the Surface Tablet is easy. Loading the Jands Vista software involves nothing more than downloading the software from the Jands website and then running the installer. Since the Surface Tablet is running Windows 8.1 there isn't any separate store, app, or software that has to be used to load Jands Vista. Once you have the software up and running on the Surface Tablet, it operates exactly like all of Jands' other console systems, the only exception is that the Surface Tablet is a touch-sensitive tablet so anything that you might do with a mouse can be done with your fingers or with a stylus. This gives you some of the Jands L5 console functionality, in a small package.
Size is one of the major strengths of the Surface Tablet; it excels in small, but small is also its weakness. Because of the compact size of the Surface Tablet screen, there will be times when you will be zooming in to read the Vista menus because they can be a bit small, but as you learn the software this becomes less of an issue. Of course, you could always use an external monitor, but this defeats some of the practicality of having a small computer package to run Jands Vista.
The touch screen on the Surface tablet is very responsive; I found that it didn't have any lag and was very accurate when using my fingers. It also had a super fine resolution when using the included stylus. It also looks great; it is bright and has excellent color and fine resolution.
I found the Surface easy to use in selecting the various functions on the console with the touch screen. It was simple to select multiple fixtures and then give them color and other parameters from the quick picker palette. Since the Jands Vista software allows you to size the icons to your liking, I was able to make the icons large enough that they were easy to select by touch, but still small enough that I could get a comfortable amount of icons on the screen at the same time. Anything that was too small was easily selected with the track pad built into the keyboard cover or with the stylus.
One thing of note is that the Surface Tablet is not multi-touch. This means that you can only move or select one thing at a time. For instance, while you have multiple faders on a virtual console, you can only move one at a time, so this doesn't make the Surface Tablet a replacement for a control console. Instead, it is better to use with an attached console since you can move all of the faders and press buttons at the same time and the Surface responds by immediately executing the command.
The Take-away
Overall, I think this is a strong little package. I liked how compact the setup was and thought that this would make a great rig for a portable church, youth room, or any setup that needs to be compact or that might get moved from place to place or setup and removed regularly, like in a multipurpose room.
It would be easy to pack the console and dock in a road case and take the tablet with you so you could work on your programming during the week. When Sunday rolls around just set up the dock and console, land the Surface Tablet in the dock, make your changes to your programming, and away you go.
While the Surface Tablet has plenty of processing power to operate a couple of universes of lights, the biggest issue I see with this is screen space. If you were good at organizing your system and used a lot of groups you absolutely could do it, but if you are someone that needs to see everything at once, you will probably find the screen size a bit cramped. Again, you could add an additional monitor and mouse, if you desired, to take care of this, but at the expense of the touch screen, unless you added a touch monitor.
In addition, you are not limited to connecting your Surface tablet via the hard DMX outputs on the console; you can also use the network port to connect via ArtNet, Pathport and the sACN DMX over Ethernet Protocols for output of up to 16 DMX universes given enough processor power. You can also use the Surface Tablet with other console configurations as a networked backup console. I really liked the touch screen feature of the Surface Tablet and found that for the dozens of fixtures I was using to test the system, it made selection and parameter changes of the fixtures fast and easy.
Overall Jands Vista running on a Microsoft Surface Pro 3 is a solid lighting control system providing an excellent balance of cost, computer power, lighting control, compact size, and ease of use. If you are looking for a compact lighting control system, especially one with touch screen capability, then Jands Vista running on the Microsoft Surface Pro 3 is definitely worth some serious consideration.
