Meet @ Pro Sound & Light , Frankfurt 24-27 March 2010 ?

[mccarrot]

Ill be there at saturday with SrS

[edison]

I,m not going because of the financial aspect and saturday is my birthday.

[mccarrot]

Hey its a great location to celibrate your birtday.

You are welcome to jump in my car at 7 in the morning

[sbk]

Just back from PL&S... It was simply the lasers paradise

I met Dimitri (hobbybob), Martin (Kvant), Robert (RGBLaserSystem), and a nice guy at Laserworld too (Jeffrey). Bill Benner was too busy so I didn't spoked to him

Most of the laser exhibitors are at Hall 11.0. Almost all of them had very nice booth, with amazing laser products, and on the biggest firm area, there was *incredible* laser/light/media/sound shows which was running every x minutes.

I have tons of pictures and video, I will post here later...

[edison]

Thanks guys

I had a really great time!!! Learned a lot about lasers and commerciallity. Also learned that company,s like Kvant and others are not taking hobbyists very seriously because of the low quantities that we buy.
I have also had a real long chat with Showtacle and RGB lasersystems and they where very helpful. I had some pictures of my projector and they were very interested. I liked the systems from RGB top notch!!!
The last one i really want to mention is CITTADINI This company is settled in spain and i was very impressed with the quality, their safety features and price.You really get what you paid for and most important: They take you very seriously as a hobbyist. Very openminded and so every question that i asked was being answered. So two tumbs up for CITTADINI!!!!!

[mccarrot]

Pictures of the Kvant stand, and a uber laser gatget.

[hobbybob]

ah well.
Here a short report of my 2 days of the PLS fair in Frankfurt.
I went there on friday morning and i arrived early in the afternoon.
Hall 11 was the place to be, with all the manufacturers like Kvant, RGB lasersystems, Cittadini and producers of Software like Medialas (Mamba) and Pangolin (QS, LD2000 etc).
First i went to meet Francesco at the pangolin booth, he kindly introduced me to Bill. Very nice to see the man in real life. He showed me Beambrush and i got to play with the newest build of Quickshow build 188.
It was very cool to see that some bugs i reported were taken out, so QS is getting better and better. Bill also showed me the new Beambrush and told me all about the development and the history.
Interesting detail is that since 1992 there is the feature in Pangolin software to change the line width, only up until now no one had come up with a way of varying the beamwidth.
Now they do, it's called beambrush and target is to aim to make it around 1000 dollars. Very cool effects can be made. Also it can be used to dynamically change the width of the beam for instance only in the lower portion of the image, so you can use it to widen the beam so the need for a negative lens is not needed anymore when audience scanning.

After my visit to the Pangolin Boot i went straight on to the Medialas booth. First looked around and then met the man who made me start to get interested in Lasers back in 1992 when i read his book about lasershow systems: Dirk Baur.
Very cool man, we had a laugh when i told him he got me into this hobby since it was his book that got the spark going. From there on it only went up with the lasers and down with my money ;-)
He showed me various lasers they had on display and introduced me to Bjorn Gerber, with which i had only email contact. All questions i had about Mamba where answered promptly on the spot.
Bjorn is a very nice guy, had a lot of patience with all my questions and was also very quick in showing me how to do certain things in Mamba. I even got to put down some feature requests which were promptly jotted down in his notebook with all new requests and ideas. I really like that kind of interactivity and feed back.

He showed me some cool new features in Mamba 2.5.
Nice change is support for SMPTE or midi time code to keep your shows sync to music. You could even set a start time 1,5 hours before for instance if you have a theater show where the lasershow starts later in the theatre production.
Also nice to see it has tabs now for the color, DMX, geometry (UGC) etc. It used to be the small buttons and now it's nicely done in tabs. Also you can make now UGC settings for different logical projectors.
For instance when you have a show starting on a screen and then later on want a beam show, you can ofcourse write a show at home using a screen and stuff but if the screen hangs at a slightly different spot in the location the show is, it's probably hard to easily adjust that part of the show. If you use the new 2.5 version of Mamba you can map a track to a logical projector mapping and set geometry for that track.
The rest of the (beam)show you just put on other tracks with a different UGC setting allowing it to scan for instance full width but restricted in height or whatever.
COol features, which my crappy english can't properly explain, but it was cool and i liked it. I liked even more that this update will again (just as the 2.1 update) be a free update for 2.0 users.

Then i headed off to the other side of the aisle from Medialas and there was Kvant. Martin noticed me and we had a nice long chat. He showed me the real cool and small Spectrum 1,3W, this is an very small box, well built.
Next to it there were 2 versions of their highpower 10W projectors. One was built with Coherent Modules the other with a Coherent for greeN (i thought) and a red and blue from Kvant.
Funny thing is , the coherent weights twice as heavy and is also twice the price. But the beamspecs of the one with Kvant modules was even better, beam was smaller and divergence just a tad better.
Martin also showed me a prototype of an RGB projector that was projecting live video which you can see on picture sam_0253 in my gallery:

http://www.photonlexicon.com/gallery...bybob/PLS2010/

Have no idea how it works, but the idea is cool, inside the machine is a spinning disk (hey isn't that how moving pictures began in the first place back in the 1900's ?)
He then showed me a foil that can be stuck to a window which shows the beams projected from the rear but then block out the light, so no light is shining outside.
Ideal for commercial use in shop windows! vERY COOL Visibility !

Also SBK showed up and Martin introduced me to him, too bad he already had to leave so early but sure was nice meeting fellow PL members from around the world ;-)
Very nice meeting you Sebastien !

Then after a few hours of walking around and taking nice pictures i went off to the hotel, to have something to eat and be ready for the next morning.

Saturday i entered the hall again around 9 AM. It was very quiet and did had the change to ask some more questions to Bjorn that came to mind. Also went and talked to Robert Kvoros from RGB lasersystems.
Really nice guys and gave a lot of useful and interesting information about the modules i have from them and the new ones they now make. For instance the big red module with 30 (!!!!) Diodes inside.
The box only measures something like 20 by 15 by 8 cm high and houses 30 diodes and optics. Serious beamstacking inside. Would love to see the inside of those ;-)
Also some pictures of their very compact Compact 4 and 8 projectors. It's amazing to see how they pack so much power in such small spaces. Secret lies in their own powersupply i guess, they put in one supply that makes all the needed voltages (12v,6V and probably also the power to the Apollo scanner drivers they use for the CT scanners). Also i liked there adjustable optics which are adjustable from the outside using a simple allen hex key.

At around noon, McCarrot, Cyberb0b, Srs and Edison arrived. We walked around the hall, first the obligatory visit to our fellow dutchman Francesco and then off to Kvant, Medialas and all the other stands.
We visited the stands of Cittadini, LSE, Arctos, HB Laser, Sollinger. Also visited the hall 11.1 which was basically about lighting and rigging, but had some interesting Doughty clamps, that were basically the same as the manfrotto clamps only rated for 20 KGs as the manfrottos are 15KG.

We had some dinner and then we went our seperate ways off to home again. Fortunately the weather was much nicer than on the trip to the fair so it only took me 2hours45 minutes to drive 400KM.
I love the german Autobahn, especially the parts where there is NO speedlimit and when there is no rain ;-)

So all in all a very cool and well spent weekend!

Check out my gallery to see some pictures, will upload (if i can / are allowed) some videos of the Sollinger show and maybe some Kvant and Lobo shows to the ildaswap ftp if that's ok and people want to see it ?
Gallery:
http://www.photonlexicon.com/gallery...bybob/PLS2010/

[drlava]

Hey hobbybob, thanks for posting your experiences and photos! wish I could have been there, it sounds great.

[hobbybob]

I have also made some videos (with my photocamera, so don't expect Hi Quality).
Have uploaded the movies to Photonlexicon FTP in the Videos directory under Pro light and Sound 2010 Frankfurt.

Have fun. Especially check out the video of the Kvant Prototype displaying 640x480 Video with an ordinary RGB projector retrofitted with some secret hush hush area 51 technology ;-)

[danielbriggs]

Thanks for the pics Dimitri! I see you had a mega time

Can I ask: What is it that is seemingly bolted onto one of the Taipan's? (Kvant's system?)
External optics? - Looks interesting.