Review syndicated from CX Magazine.

It’s probably safe to say Robe is telling this one like it is. The BMFL is indeed a
bright multi-function luminaire, and it’s very much all of those things.

BMFL uses a 1 700W discharge lamp which Osram developed in conjunction with
Robe over the course of two years specifically for this application. That’s a whole
lot of Watts – the most in fact I’ve ever seen in a moving head fixture. It’s
definitely a single-fixture-per-10A-circuit kind of deal – just feel the heat which
emanates from the back of the head if you want to better understand why.

Despite a busy schedule, we managed to secure the BMFL for long enough to sit it
down and ask some questions. The first of these was: “How bright are you?’ The
obvious answer was to get a light meter and check the 220 000 lux at 5m spec. I
carefully measured the distance and got the beam focused up, then stuck the meter
into the light field. It wasn’t able to tell me much other than more light was being
produced than it was capable of reading. So I’ll make do with my own
observations. It’s very bright – to the point I had some very real concerns about
burning holes in my cyc at 5m.

Obviously with such a bright source lamp life will be impacted – at 1 700W the lamp
is rated to 500 hours. The lamp can be bumped down to 1 500W or 1 200W output
which extends its lifespan around 50% to 750 hours. Personally I found the
difference from 1 700 to 1 500W pretty hard to pick – it’s still very bright.

Changing output isn’t possible via the fixture touch screen but instead done by DMX.
Colour happens in two forms on BMFL – a CMY mixing system allows for extremely
smooth and gradual shifts from open white through to saturated colours. I tried a
couple of 30-second colour fades and the process is so subtle it’s virtually
indiscernible. Dimming is equally smooth and there are no changes to the beam
during either process. In addition to the CMY system, two colour wheels allow for
saturated colours and TV colours (minus-green, CTB, lavender and so on). The
wheels are indexed such that you can also do split-colour beams.

BMFL has an electronic motion stabilisation system which is kind of hard to see in
action. The idea is that it better deals with truss swing caused by multiple heads
simultaneously moving. It’s really hard to observe this in our test environment with
the fixture on a bench, but what is obvious is how well its movement is controlled.
Even on fast tilts the fixture comes to a nice, precise stop. If knocked it homes to
the correct position with alarming accuracy – pretty important if you’re using it over
a throw distance of 80m or so (which is a pretty realistic application).

Zoom range is five to 53 degrees and stupidly fast. The dual gobo wheels are both
rotatable and indexable – one wheel has breakup effects and the other is more
geared toward projected images. The BMFL uses the same six-facet linear and
four-facet circular prisms as found on the MMX. There are three variable frost
filters too.

Natively, BMFL has a fairly high colour temperature but can happily put out anything
between 2 700 and 6 000K.

I think the BMFL is something of a contradiction. It’s a hulking giant light source in
a compact body. The sheer brutish output means you can jam all the beam effects
you want in-line and still achieve really solid output.

Perhaps most surprising is how refined the control and optics are – it does
everything you ask quickly and with a level of precision I simply wasn’t expecting
from such a BMFL.

Brand: Robe
Model: BMFL
RRP: R156 310 ex-Vat in dual case
Price correct at time of print and subject to change.
Distributor: DWR Distribution
Product Info: www.robe.cz

Review syndicated from CX Magazine.