LIGHT & SOUND INTERNATIONAL • DECEMBER 2017
ENTERTAINMENT • PRESENTATION • INSTALLATION
IN THIS ISSUE:
Theatre: Network
Combining stage and screen
Tech Focus: Robin MegaPointe
Robe’s all-purpose moving head
Review: JTSE, Paris
Showfl oor highlights
A WORLD FIRST FOR BRISTOL HIPPODROME • ER PRODUCTIONS: RECORD BREAKERS
STAGECO: GOING MOBILE • BUILDING TRUST: AUDIO & ARCHITECTURE
FAC365: CHANNEL HOPPING • AUTHENTICITY IN DESIGN - AND MUCH MORE . . .
La Perle
Dragone Studio in Dubai
www.lsionline.com
DIGITAL
EDITION
Rob has been working in and
writing about lighting for more than
25 years, on shows around the
world. He wonders if this makes
him a classic... or just old!
classic gear
i
TECH
DECEMBER 2017
•
WWW.LSIONLINE.COM66
Claypaky Sharpy | by Rob Halliday . . .
Nowadays, there’s a trend for
multi-skilling, multi-tasking, trying to
cram as many functions as possible
into each product. But you know what they
say - a jack of all trades is a master of none.
Sometimes it’s better just to do one thing, and
do it spectacularly well. Claypaky’s remarkable
little Sharpy is a perfect case in point.
At a time when each new generation of
moving lights seemed to get bigger, heavier
and with an even higher wattage lamp than
the generation before, this tiny little thing
appeared with its ability to project a beam of
light that just seemed to go on forever. And
I mean a true beam: parallel sided, zero
degree, not the cone of light every other
fixture created.
Parallel beam lights were by no means
new, of course. There have been traditional
beam lights or beam projectors in the
catalogues of many lighting manufacturers
for decades: usually a parabolic mirror plus a crown-silvered
lamp giving a delicious quality of light. For a more robust, more
tourable (if less precise and less elegant) solution, there was the
low-voltage ACL lamp in a PAR Can. And there have even been
attempts to make those thick beams move - two of DHA’s Digital
Beamlights continue to perform nightly on Les Misérables in
London - but they were big and just a bit
fragile.
What Claypaky did was re-invent the
beamlight for the modern age. They took
a tiny discharge source, the MSD Platinum
lamp, and designed a remarkable optical
system around it to collect the light and
throw it forward through a big front lens as
a tight, clean, parallel-edged beam, almost
laser-like in its precision. In terms of
brightness, the lamp was just 189W, but 20m
away you’d still measure almost 60,000lx.
“Who thought we’d ever see a 190W fixture
that we could use in Wembley Arena,” said
product award judges at the PLASA Show in
2010, awarding it an Award for Innovation.
Just as importantly, the compact lamp and
optics delivered a compact fixture. You could
fit a lot of them in your truck and then in your
rig, packed close together for dramatic looks.
That tiny size also meant the fixtures could
move fast, the kind of speed rarely seen since
the heyday of the moving mirror light.
The Sharpy’s debut coincided with
a growing range of major events, particularly
TV shows with significant lighting demands
that could create never-seen-before looks.
The Sharpy provided such looks and very
quickly it was everywhere. Not that it was
quite a one-trick pony - its compact body also packed in a gobo
wheel, a zoom lens (billed as 0 - 3.8˚) and a prism alongside the
mechanical dimmer and a 15-slot colour wheel; you could also
do variations on its beam. But what sold it to the world was its
parallel beam look, that solid shaft of light that seemingly went
on forever. Though if you wanted to make your Sharpys stand
out, you could order them in chrome finish -
or, if you were working by royal appointment,
even with patriotic Union Flag casing!
I
Sharpy at Claypaky:
P www.claypaky.it/en/products/sharpy
And the patriotic version:
P //plasa.me/unionjack
Music to your in-ears
The new sound in ‘world tour ready’ in-ear monitoring
• Huge 330Mhz tuning range
• Unique true diversity reception
• Up to 2W RF output power
• Ultra high performance audio processing
www.raycom.co.uk 01789 777040
B The Sharpy complete with Union
Jack livery
“What Claypaky did was re-invent the beamlight for the modern age . . .”
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