Shoot Review: Kino Flo VistaBeam

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.

Bottom: The 96W daylight-balanced lamps are brightly mirrored in parabolic reflectors. Photo by D. W. Leitner

But there was one limitation they could not overcome. Soft sources such as fluorescent tubes are not suitable for focusable, directional lighting instruments such as Fresnels or parabolic aluminized reflectors (PARs). This will always be the case — physics is physics — which is why point sources such as tungsten, HMI, xenon, and even carbon arc have nothing to fear from fluorescents when it comes to hard theatrical lighting. But Kino Flo's new VistaBeam family of lights, the VistaBeam 300 and VistaBeam 600, are remarkably more directional than the JBOT (just a bunch of tubes) designs of the past. They represent a big leap forward in professional fluorescent lighting.

VistaBeam uses new high-output, 96W lamps, each nearly 3ft. long. (This makes the six-tube VistaBeam 600 about 3'×3'.) There are four flavors: 2900 degrees tungsten, 5500 degrees daylight, 420nm blue, and 550nm green — the latter two for lighting blue- and greenscreens. The new lamp's 2-pin base slides readily in and out of its socket — less fussy than the base used in the ParaBeam and Diva-Lite series. The new base also locks the tube when fully seated. The other end of the tube, the U, is latched by a flexible metal clip for additional security.

Fans of ParaBeam and Diva-Lite dimmability (you turn a knob, and the tubes brighten or diminish) are in for a surprise when they turn the dimming knob at the back of the VistaBeam or on Kino Flo's remote dimmer. The tubes don't dim! Instead, individual tubes turn on or off in sequence. In other words, VistaBeam's output is raised or lowered by switching on or off lamps, one at a time, much like a PAR nine-light or Barger Lite. Not as satisfying as trimming the output of a Diva by inching a knob, I'll grant you, but on the other hand, it eliminates the possibility of skewing the lamp's color temperature subtly towards magenta when dimmed — a complaint sometimes voiced by Diva users.

The VistaBeam 300 and 600, at 29lbs. and 47lbs. each, respectively, are heftier than most Kino Flo products but still light in weight for their size because (1) they lack glass optics and heat-resistant housings, and (2) Kino Flo designs remain innovative, favoring lightweight solutions.

If you think about it, VistaBeam's flat design marries origin and source; typically, these are separate objects in softlights. For example, in a standard Chimera Lightbank, the quartz-halogen fixture is the light origin, while the fabric diffuser is the effective light source. This requires distance for beam spread, inflating the size of the combined lighting unit. By design, this is inefficient — after all, the cloth diffuser blocks and scatters light. Double-layer diffusers double this inefficiency. VistaBeam's design, by contrast, is a study in state-of-the-art, lightweight mirrored reflectors.

Kino Flo crafted the compact VistaBeam for studio use, however, and this shows not only in the solid build but also the remote DMX control. A small panel at the rear of the VistaBeam contains a pair of 5-pin XLR connectors for DMX in/out as well as a dial to set the fixture's DMX address. (DMX is a lighting remote control interface for boards and dimmers, akin to MIDI for digital musical instruments.)

Remote control is necessary because Kino Flo has positioned VistaBeam, particularly the 600, as a replacement for overhead space lights. (Classic 6K space lights are large silk cylinders, akin to giant china balls, with six 1K tungsten lamps arranged radially at the top, which can be switched on and off in pairs — useful for soft lighting of large cycloramas and locations.) Kino Flo says that the VistaBeam 600 at 9 amps emits more light than a 4K tungsten softlight at 34 amps. The control panel at the rear also contains a toggle switch labeled “STD” and “HO,” for standard and high-output modes. The HO mode turbocharges the amperage, and you can easily see the brightness hike. (I work mostly with daylight tubes, and I didn't detect a color shift at either setting.)

Bottom: The 96W daylight-balanced lamps are brightly mirrored in parabolic reflectors. Photo by D. W. Leitner

Where an overhead space light would require a black Duvetyne skirt to control spill, VistaBeam uses a set of featherweight, finely honeycombed, louvered screens. These limit spill to a spread of 90 degrees, a tighter 60 degrees, and an even tighter 45 degrees. Half an inch thick, each screen pops into a dedicated recessed rim and easily clicks into place. A press of a button on the frame of each louver releases them. Couldn't be easier or simpler. Combined with VistaBeam's softly directional light, they work exceedingly well. I used the 90-degree and 60-degree versions, and I don't think I've ever encountered louvers as efficient as these.

Just below the recessed rim that accepts the louvers is a second, slightly narrower rim for a dedicated gel frame, which also pops in and out using buttons on the frame. This lightweight aluminum frame has eight clips for gels and other lighting control.

At the four corners of the tray-shaped VistaBeam are detachable “corner mount blocks,” high-impact black plastic bumpers that look carved from an oversized milk crate. Here is Kino Flo industrial design at its best: These unique bumpers protect VistaBeam's corners, absorb shock if dropped, provide hanging points for ropes and safety cables, allow VistaBeams to be stacked, function as feet to stand VistaBeam on end, and even act as spacers in the shipping case. They shout, “Attach me!”

Speaking of VistaBeam cases, they're huge. Not heavy for their size, particularly, but not luggage-sized like that of a Diva-Lite kit. Not even close. Even the VistaBeam 300 case (40.5"×24"×14") is bulky — you'll be glad it's on wheels. Did I mention these were studio lights?

I do mostly on-location lighting, so I tested the compact VistaBeam 300, which features three tubes instead of six and is therefore half the width of the 600 but otherwise identical. Kino Flo says the 300 produces more light than a 2K softlight, but I'd say the company is being conservative. As a softlight, VistaBeam has a pronounced peculiarity that I found useful. Because its parabolic reflectors encircle the diameter of each tube but not its length (this would be impossible), the beam thrown by VistaBeam is “lateral,” as Kino Flo calls it. The reflectors concentrate light along an axis perpendicular to the length of the tubes — along the VistaBeam's width, let's say, not its height. What results is a beam that is gently oblong — perhaps more so from the three-tube VistaBeam 300 than from the square VistaBeam 600. It's what puts the vista in VistaBeam. I like widescreen formats, so I appreciate a beam shape that is wide too.

To exploit this, VistaBeam offers — in addition to a conventional yoke mount — an alternative center mount with another Kino Flo innovation: a wide-diameter plate to rotate the entire VistaBeam light 360 degrees for easy adjustment of beam angle. The VistaBeam 300 I used also had a sliding junior stud rigged to a short length of Speed-Rail attached to the rotating center mount. All very clever.

In the end, what matters most is the quality of light. In this regard, pardon the pun, VistaBeam shines. At a distance where ordinary fluorescent fixtures would fall off, it delivers. By no means a hard light, it wraps like the broad source that it is, but punches slightly too. Its output is even and flat over an impressive area (depending upon the louver used). So be warned: if you're already a fan of ParaBeams or Diva-Lites, as I am, trying a VistaBeam will induce lust.

The hitch, as mentioned above, is that VistaBeams aren't particularly portable — less than ideal in this era of mounting baggage costs. Nor are they pocket change. At B&H Photo Video, a VistaBeam 300 without a case will set you back $2,250, and a VistaBeam 600 $3,600. But look at it this way: That's considerably less than a pro HDV camcorder. And which of the two won't be obsolete in two years?

Beautiful lighting is a joy forever.

Company: Kino Flo
www.kinoflo.com

Product: VistaBeam

Assets: Less scatter and more throw than many fluorescents, solidly built, remote control available, efficient louvers.

Caveats: Not particularly portable, pricey.

Demographic: Anyone in need of a high-performance studio light.

PRICE: $4,250 (LIST, VISTABEAM 600); $2,650 (LIST, VISTABEAM 300); $5,200 (LIST, VISTABEAM 600 KIT); $3,375 (LIST, VISTABEAM 300 KIT)

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