Seen & Heard @ InfoComm

Ahh InfoComm - Land of the AV cornucopia.

The lighting ghetto has been relegates to the far north end of the hall. The sound area is @ the far south and then there's Crestron and Extron in the middle. Ok, I sort of exaggerate. I grabbed a quick video of the lighting area starting with the Tech for Worship Stage and panning over.

Ok - here's the short list on the cool and news things we've seen at the show:

• Neutrik is showing their new XX-HD heavy duty XLR connectors that are both dust and water protected, yes, that's an IP67 rating when used with the related XX-HD cable connector or Neutrik's MPR-HD chassis connector.
• AC Lighting has the Chroma-Q Color Block 2 LED fixture (photo) and Magic Box EtherSwitch 7 Ethernet switch.
• Our friends @ TMB brought from England the amBIENT XC from amBX. It's this cool LED controller that can control the colors in an environment reacting to both sound and video. This thing would be great for themed-environments that need a seamless lighting control solution that's simple and flexible.
  
• Another pretty slick item we saw is Global Design Solutions' (GDS) LiteWare RGB Battery Uplighter. It's a 38W RGB LED emitter with Wireless DMX Control, a 24 hour runtime from fully charged battery (14 hours on full white), it's P45 - interior/exterior use. You can get them alone or in a 6-pack flightcases with inbuilt charging. You can see a video of it here.

We got a press release the other day but, albeit quietly Leviton has a new control desk.. The new Piccolo line of lighting controllers . It can function easily as a standard manual/memory board with traditional channel capacities with clear interface components, but it also offers support for limited channel automated devices. It features:

• Operating modes – two scene, single scene and sub-master “theater” mode
• 32 attribute channels for automated devices
• Full access to all channels via faders
• Proportional softpatch to all 512 DMX channels
• Off line editor

Another nice looking product that made it's way from LightFair down to the show is Illuminarc's new line of architeural lighting. They have both indoor and outdoor lighting and we really like the simple way to sort out power supplies they call theor Logic Sysytem (all the lights use the same power supply, you just need to keep track of how many leds on a given run)