DEFINITION June 2018

USER REVIEW DMG MINI MIX

THE MIX SERIES USES ADDITIONAL ORANGE AND LIME- GREEN EMITTERS TO EXTEND THE RANGE OF COLOURS

red, green, blue and white LEDs, the Mix series uses additional orange and lime-green emitters to extend the range of colours the light can create. Several of the LEDs are visibly based on the blue-driven phosphor technology, which produces a smoother, less spiky and more controllable output spectrum. The multi-emitter approach would make the light’s gamut on a CIE diagram into an irregular pentagon rather than the conventional triangle, improving the available range of colours, and is presumably the reason for the high colour quality performance. The company tells us that the Mini Mix costs €2490 (about £2200). This is an ambitious price for a 100- watt light, and the feature set puts the Mini Mix into competition with the likes of Kino Flo’s Celeb 250. The Celeb is more expensive, but also 50% more powerful, to the point where the Mini Mix costs 15% more per watt. Still, given its feature set, excellent colour quality, and that neatly-done smartphone app, Rosco’s new light could hardly do more to justify the price tag.

of a hundred or more, which may be visible, but the Mini Mix does not. The crucial red and blue output are best represented by the CRI test patches called R9 (red) and R12 (blue), which should ideally be at 100% exposure relative to other test colours after compensating for colour temperature. At 3200K, the Mini Mix achieves 81 R9 and 94 R12, a good result. At 5600K, R9 increases to 88 while R12 falls off to 74. This is the only result in the test series which is anything less than excellent; a little more deep blue wouldn’t hurt, and the number really only seems low in comparison to the otherwise high performance. There isn’t really a standard for the assessment of coloured lighting, although the mark one eyeball revealed a reasonably close match for Rosco’s colour filters based on comparison with a swatchbook. The Mini Mix is among the top few devices currently available that combine colour and white output. The technology used is interesting, with clusters of six LEDs under the interchangeable diffusion panel. As well as the conventional

down to 0.1%, although, as with many LEDs, there’s a small step between the lowest level of output and none at all. The output was tested at 7500K, 6500K, 5600K, 4000K, 3200K and 2850K using the UPRTek CV600 meter. Measurements included colour temperature accuracy and the quality of the white light according to the television lighting consistency index (TLCI,) a more stringent measure than the older colour rendering index (CRI). Each colour temperature was tested at 1%, 25%, 50% and full power, to identify any problems with maintenance of colour over a range of intensities. These tests were carried out in white-emitting mode, although the colour-emitting mode, with the saturation set to zero, performs equally well, avoiding any issues when using carefully desaturated colours. TLCI The Mini Mix achieved TLCI of at least 91.2 at all 64 of the test points. For perspective, the TLCI specification suggests that above 85, “errors are so small that a colourist would not consider correcting them.” This low point coincided with the lowest available colour temperature of 2850K, at intensities below 25%. Otherwise, TLCI was in the mid to high 90s for almost all tests, a very good result. Results at 5600K were particularly good, reading uniformly over 97. Colour temperature accuracy was also very high, within a few tens of the ideal; many lights have errors

ABOVE The remote control for the new Mini Mix light system.

BELOW Finding the right colour has become much easier with the new DMG Mix GUI.

DEFINITION JUNE 2018