Street Price: $1,200
Osram is well known in the theater industry for lamps used in theatrical fixtures. Anyone with some ETC Source Four fixtures probably has a stock of Osram HPL575 lamps on hand at all times. However, until contacted by CPM about doing this review, I was not aware that they had ventured into the theatrical fixture space themselves.
Overview
The Osram Kreios Fresnel 80W RGBW fixture is an LED color-changing wash fixture with adjustable beam width. It’s of similar size to a traditional Fresnel, but a bit longer and a bit heftier, weighing in at about 10 pounds. The fixture is solidly built—I’m impressed with the construction quality of the unit.
The fixture comes with a standard theatrical yoke, and the components needed to create a power cord. This fixture does not come with a power cord—just the PowerCon pieces that you can use to build a power chord from scratch, or convert an existing power cable to be used with the fixture.
For control, DMX input and pass-through are provided through standard five-pix XLR connectors.
The zoom angle ranges from 14-77 degrees, adjustable via a knob that slides along the length of the lens barrel at the bottom of the fixture. Barn doors for shuttering the beam are available as an optional accessory.
Seven different fixture profiles are available, providing control from as little as one channel of DMX to 15 channels of DMX. I chose to go with the 15-channel profile since that offers the maximum feature set. This provides 16-bit control of the intensity, red, green, blue, and white attributes. Additionally, there is an eight-bit attribute for shutter control that provides for strobing and pulsing effects; a macro channel for pre-programmed color effects; and a few attributes related to setting and recalling a setting for what you would like to consider the color “white” to be.
Operation & Impressions
The fixture is easy to set up and operate. An LCD menu system on the back of the fixture lets you set the DMX address, operating mode, or even operate the fixture manually if desired. Being a new fixture, my Jands Vista software did not have a profile available for it, so I created a fixture profile for their 15-address operating mode. (And a quick shout-out to Jands and AC Lighting for providing a license for Vista for making my fixture review process easier.)
On firing the fixture up, my first impression is that it puts out a nice, even circle of light, as you’d expect from a Fresnel fixture. It’s not the brightest LED fixture I’ve seen recently, but it’s a respectable amount of light. The fixture is marketed for small- to mid-sized venues, which seems about right to me. If your venue has a significant amount of ambient lighting, this fixture would probably have a hard time cutting through it. I tested it at our small church which has a lot of windows, and found that during the daytime, the fixture really could not cut through the ambient light in the room to make an impact on what you want to light up—the projected light was just barely visible with the fixture zoomed in tightly from about 20 feet away.
With all emitters on full and at 11 feet from the fixture, I measured 78 fc (foot-candles) at the center of the beam at the narrowest zoom setting, and 16 fc at its widest beam diameter. With only the white emitters on, the brightness fell to 35 and 7, respectively. It should be noted that most light meters in use today are notorious for providing low readings on LED luminaires, so the actual numbers for this fixture are probably higher. But by simply visually looking at the beam, it’s clear it’s not extremely bright—it certainly does not come close to competing with the light output of a tungsten Fresnel fixture.
Fades and color changes are very smooth. The 16-bit attributes for color and intensity definitely help, especially with longer fade times. I noticed a little bit of “stepping” with this fixture with longer fades, where you notice the light take steps from one level to the next, but it was very mild. And the fixture has an option you can set via the control panel where it will fade between level changes over 1/4 of a second, which would smooth this out a bit, but limit you with regards to achieving extremely fast blackouts.
For white balance, the white emitters by themselves seem to come close to daylight. I found it hard to get a close match to tungsten; even the built-in color temperature macros did not give a color of light that matched my Arri 650 Fresnel extremely close. If you are primarily using this fixture for a stage color wash, this won’t matter; and if what you want is keylight for your platform, Osram has a warm white version of the fixture that presumably is designed to match tungsten much more closely for those front-lighting needs.
The color saturation was very nice, providing a great range of colors. I was not able to locate any CRI information from Osram for this fixture, so it is not documented how well the fixture renders colors accurately.
Summary
The Osram Kreios Fresnel RGBW 80W fixture is a nice little fixture, but at the street price of $1,200, it’s not as bright as I would expect. If you have a small venue with few ambient light concerns, this could certainly be a fixture worth checking out—I’d suggest arranging for a demo to see how well it would work in your space.
