Mega-Lite has long provided quality LED lighting at a better-than-average price point. Recently, the company expanded its offerings with the Drama W50 profile fixture, available with or without DMX control. CPM was provided a 19-degree unit with three-pin DMX control for evaluation (five-pin is also an option).
The fixture is surprisingly petite and lightweight—only 14.5 inches long and less than five pounds. The fixture has an all-plastic housing with a metal yoke. It comes with a small DMX control box that you attach on the yoke, and connects to the fixture via a USB cable. This control box has DMX input and pass-through, as well as a digital display and four push buttons for operating the fixture manually or setting its DMX operating parameters.
DMX control has three operating profiles; the first, mode A, uses one address of DMX and provides a non-dimmed on-off functionality. The second, mode P, also takes one address, and provides an intensity attribute. The third, mode F, uses two addresses and provides intensity and strobe attributes.
I tested the fixture using mode F. Setup was pretty simple, with one hitch. The center hole in the yoke is drilled for a 10 mm bolt, which is slightly smaller than the bolt on a typical lighting pipe C clamp. There are pipe clamps available that use a 10mm bolt, but they appear to be designed more for DJ lighting rigs or truss, rather than what's normally used in a theater/auditorium environment. Mega-Lite reports that they intend to increase the size of the hole in the yoke to accommodate larger bolts.
Impressions
I was blown away by the light output of this little guy. The Drama LED is surprisingly bright.
I created a quick fixture profile for it for my Jands Vista software, and fired the fixture up to see what it could do. Being so small, I confess I had low expectations from my initial impression. But then I turned it on.
The Drama LED is surprisingly bright—I was blown away by the light output of this little guy. It produces a clean circle of light like you'd expect from a profile fixture, with no artifacts in the beam, or from when the shutters were moved into position.
The beam angle of 19 degrees measured out accurately. The rated lumen output of the fixture is 2,557; I measured 81 foot-candles at 13 feet, with a beam diameter of 57 inches. (It should be noted that this number is likely low, as most lighting meters do not accurately measure the full spectrum of light emitted by LED light sources.) The beam intensity dropped off evenly to 61 fc at the edge of the beam.
The fixture is rated for a color-rendering index (CRI) of 84. This isn't the best CRI for LED profile fixtures out there, but I found that colors looked natural under the light, both in-person and via video.
The color temperature of the fixture is 5,749K. This is a bit cooler than Daylight, and in looking at it through my video camera, I needed to up the color temperature of the camera to 6,200 to get the white background to not have a bluish tint to it. The fixture looked fine on video; no flickering was observed at any of the shutter speeds I tested.
The fixture has five dimming speeds that are selectable via the control menu. Speed 0 is no fade time at all; speed 4 is the slowest dimming curve. At even speed 1, the light “dimmed” to zero too slowly to match my tungsten fixture in a quick blackout cue; leaving it at 0 would make sense for a theatrical environment. But it won't match a tungsten dimming curve exactly.
The fixture does include a gobo frame and can have gobos inserted into it just like a tungsten ellipsoidal fixture. However, it appears to be a non-standard size. My Source Four Jr gobos were too large to be inserted, so I was unable to test this aspect of the fixture.
Take away
Overall, this fixture is quite impressive for the price. Its color temperature and dimming curve will make it hard for it to fit into an existing tungsten rig; one could likely use a color-correcting filter to bring it more in line with either daylight fixtures or tungsten, but (especially going to tungsten) you'll lose light output if you do add a filter.
For a list price of $559 ($489 without the DMX controller), the Drama W50 gives you a lot of punch for the money. It could be especially useful for pattern projection where you'd likely be gelling the image anyway to achieve your goals. And since it draws less than one amp of power and is very lightweight, it would be very useful in spaces where power is a concern, such as a portable church setting up in a school. In addition, when in use in a space with a lot of windows, such as a school cafeteria, the color temperature could be an asset rather than a liability. As noted earlier, future revisions of the fixture would do well to include a yoke hole large enough for a standard theatrical C pipe clamp.
