Wow love it, no idea those things came in a desktop'ish size would love to own one some day to light up the warehouse.
i see there is also a LED versin available
http://www.zeiss.de/C12567B00038CD75...25701D0054D037
"its called character briggs..."
That's the ZKP4. The ZKP3 was a conventional planetarium projector with geared planets.
The ZKP4 has a fiber optic star field. The condensor lenses in the 32 star field projectors are
replaced with fiber optics positioned to illuminate each individual star on the star plates. That little trick increased efficiency about 200x. The ZKP4 also has 8 servo driven planetary projectors that can jump to any point in time that you want to display. Both have position feed back - means you can have great stars and use fulldome video to do other effects, or transition to a fulldome star field and "boldly go".
Fulldome video is taking the planetarium world by storm. On the high end Zeiss and maybe Seos make video projectors with good enough contrast to prevent washing out the opto-mechanical stars. The other video systems have a gray background that washes out the opto-mechanical stars. None of the video systems can produce a star field remotely like the top of the line opto-mechanical projectors - but the pull of the video systems is strong, and "the audience doesn't know the difference." - some the old planetarium based laserists may recognise the argument - it's been used before...
Last edited by laserist; 03-11-2012 at 16:22.
Pretty cool. I too had no idea star projectors of decent quality came in this size.
- Jonathan
Maybe I'm missing the actual size specifications on this...
How small is this?
Very cool
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That's a very nice instrument, thanks for sharing! It's very similar to one I used to work on, it was the Jena Spacemaster. In my opinion, it's very sad to see so many theaters dump the mechanical/optical instrument in favor of full dome video. There are two problems with this; number one the full dome video just cannot recreate the night sky as well as a planetarium can. 2nd, removing the planetarium from the planetarium theater takes away the mysteriousness, the awe of having such an instrument so prominently displayed in the center of the room. Now, alot of theaters have just a video projector in the center of the room. Don't get me wrong, the technology behind the full dome video is very impressive and the effect you can create is astounding, but, if you want a quality, diverse theater, you should have both a planetarium and full dome video. Not either one, both, and some theaters have been smart enough to implement both instruments.