DEFINITION June 2018

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USER REVIEW DMG MINI MIX

Rosco’s buyout of French Canadian company DMG has resulted in a new programmable LED light with phone app user interface DMG MINIMIX WORDS PHIL RHODES

opular as LEDs are, they aren’t anywhere near replacing big movie lights. The biggest point source is probably the rare

RIGHT The MiniMix has a great phone App and user interface. Finger pickin' good.

and expensive Mole Tener LED, at 1600W, while the biggest HMIs are fifteen times that. Still, development of LED tools for the film industry is helped out by the massive R&D spend targeting domestic and commercial lighting, and it seems very likely that one day, every light on a film set will be based on LEDs – and it’s increasingly clear that they will also offer programmable colour. Rosco’s launch of a light implementing exactly that suggests that one of the world’s top filter companies has seen change coming and is keen to pre-empt it. Rosco acquired DMG Lumière in September 2017, presumably with an eye on their Mix series of LED panel lights which provide both conventional white light and full colour mixing effects. To date, though, lights capable of doing

combine to create white. Crucially, the phosphor can’t convert light to a deeper blue than the blue of the LED, and converting blue light all the way to red light, at the other end of the spectrum, is hard work. It’s also not possible to create good quality white light by mixing red, green and blue LEDs. Instead of a continuous spectrum of white light, the result would have three sharp spikes, and struggle to properly illuminate anything other than colourless subjects. These issues can be dealt with through careful design, though, and doing so well is key to the success of a light such as Rosco’s new baby. MINI MIX The device under review is the Mini Mix, a panel 205x885mm (8x23in) rated at 100W output. It will find a use lighting anything from the smaller corners of a film set to a

both white and coloured light really well have been comparatively rare, often sacrificing the colour quality of the white light as a necessary compromise to offer colour mixing. It’s worth a quick recap on why this is difficult. There is no such thing as a white-emitting LED; there are only blue LEDs topped with a phosphor, often chosen so that the blue light from the LED and yellow light from the phosphor

BELOW The DMG Mini Mix lights with various Rosco gels.

DEFINITION JUNE 2018

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