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MillimeterShoot Review: Kino Flo VistaBeam
Sep 1, 2008 12:00 PM, Reviewer: D. W. Leitner
New light design takes fluorescent to a higher level.
The Kino Flo VistaBeam 300 uses three high-output, 96W lamps, each nearly 3ft. long, along with a newly designed parabolic reflector to deliver a soft beam of light 20ft. in front of the unit. Kino Flo says the 300 produces more light than a 2K softlight.
VistaBeam is a new design from Kino Flo that marries twin compact fluorescent tubes — long, slender, U-shaped tubes like those introduced in Kino Flo's ParaBeam and its popular lightweight version, Diva-Lite — to a newly designed parabolic reflector that wraps around the backside of each tube to collect and project light to a point roughly 20ft. in front of the VistaBeam. It's as if each lamp in the three-tube VistaBeam 300 or six-tube VistaBeam 600 shoots a soft beam of light into the near distance. Hence the name.
The classic problem with diffuse sources such as fluorescent is that no matter how radiant they are, brightness drops off rapidly with distance. Lacking directionality, their output is also hard to control or flag from the rest of the set. However, if you stand about 20ft. in front of a naked VistaBeam and look back into it, what you see reflected on either side of each twin tube is light output that appears brighter than the tube itself. The magic of VistaBeam's parabolic reflectors is twofold: They drive light forward with noticeably less fall-off, and their output blends with that of the tubes themselves to form a broad, unbroken source that avoids multiple shadows. The result is a new type of fluorescent with less scatter and more throw.
A little background: Just like other lighting companies founded by inventive cameramen and gaffers (Barger Lite and LitePanels come to mind), Kino Flo has a history of introducing lighting instruments that are game-changers for DPs. Others in the 1980s had experimented with fluorescent lighting for film, but Kino Flo's founders uniquely combined phosphors tailored to tungsten and daylight sources (minimal green spike) with high-frequency ballasts for high, flickerless output. Plus, one more thing — that ineffable quality Apple understands so well — industrial design. To capitalize on the lightness and coolness characteristic of fluorescent tubes, Kino Flo created ultra-light but durable instruments through trademark use of Velcro, corrugated plastic, and flexible yet stiff aluminum wire.
The rear control panel of the VistaBeam 300 includes a DMX in/out and address. The select knob turns tubes on and off in sequence instead of dimming the tubes. Photo by D. W. Leitner
Kino Flos became instant classics, and it's not hard to understand why. If you were lighting locations in the '80s, you knew all about the heartbreak of “tungstenitis”: laying dusty cable to iffy tie-ins or balky generators, blown fuses, broken filaments, burned gels, blistered fingertips, windows opened between takes, long hours in sweltering rooms, and simmering lights that took forever to cool while packing. Didn't matter if you were lighting industrial interviews with Ianero Red Heads or feature sets with 2K Fresnels.
Ballast-driven hydrargyrum medium-arc iodides (HMIs) arrived from Europe in the early '80s as a solution, and while they proved considerably more energy-efficient than conventional quartz-halogen lamps with tungsten filaments — three to four times the luminous efficiency per watt, in fact — they introduced their own hassles and rituals. And they were dauntingly expensive.
Common fluorescent lights — hailed today for their green contribution to cutting national energy costs — had long offered the same energy efficiency as HMIs but without the exotic lamp technology. (It's why CBS in the late 1940s keyed its first black-and-white TV studios in New York with fluorescent fixtures: low cost, low power, long life, and reduced air conditioning.) So, to solve finally the problem of fluorescent flicker in the case of lighting motion pictures, Kino Flo's inventors boosted their ballasts from the commonplace 60 cycles per second to 27,000 cycles per second. To solve the problem of fluorescent's characteristic greenish cast — due to a discontinuous spectrum with a spike in green, much like that of HMIs — and to effectively match tungsten and daylight sources, Kino Flo's inventors created custom mixes of phosphors, fine-tuned to the amperage output of their customized high-speed ballasts.
