New in the Fleet: Elation Paragon M

The lighting that looks right in the room and the lighting that looks right on the stream are not always the same lighting.

Push color fidelity up and you give up punch. Chase output and skin tones go strange on camera. Usually that call gets made on a purchase order, months before anyone knows what the show is, and a designer lives with whatever was decided.

The Elation Paragon M moves the decision to a fader.

CRI on a fader

TruTone is Elation’s name for a dual LED engine that blends high and low CRI sources. What it means in practice is that color fidelity is a DMX channel, continuously adjustable from CRI 73 to 93, with no step or jump anywhere in the range.

Run 93 on the interview set and the panel chairs. Drop to 80 for beam looks and gobo texture. Same fixture, same cue stack, no swap and no gel.

Worth knowing that the curve peaks in the middle rather than at the top. CRI 80 is the fixture’s brightest point, and moving in either direction costs some output, so 80 is where these should sit unless a scene asks for something else.

The rest of the color system is conventional and good. CMY mixing, linear CTO down to 2,600 K, and a six-position wheel carrying red, blue, green, UV, a quad-color, and a smoothing filter that cleans up color fringing along framing cuts when a gobo is in the gate.

Two fixtures, one body

We bought Fresnel glass for every one of them.

As it ships, the Paragon M is a framing profile. Four blackout blades, each indexing 45° either way, the whole framing module rotating 120° either way, two wheels of seven rotating glass gobos, and a full animation wheel. Hard edges, clean shutter cuts, logo work.

Change the lens assembly and it becomes a Fresnel. The zoom shifts rather than widens, trading the tight 4.5° end for a few more degrees at the top. The number that actually describes the change is the cutoff angle, which goes from 4.5° to 54.2° out to 13.4° to 60.4°. The edge stops being an edge.

Twenty-four fixtures, twenty-four lens kits, so the split is yours. All profile, all Fresnel, or twelve and twelve.

One honest note. The swap is four screws, a safety cable, and a torque driver set to spec, which makes it shop work rather than deck work. Tell us the split when you book and they show up configured.

The specs that matter

• Light source: 900 W 6,500 K variable CRI white LED, 30,000 hour average life
• Output: 37,200 lm at CRI 80
• Color fidelity: TruTone variable CRI 73 to 93, live on a DMX channel
• Color: CMY mixing, linear CTO to 2,600 K, six-position wheel with UV, quad-color, and smoothing filter
• Profile lens (standard): 4.5° to 52° zoom, 4.4° to 52° field, 4.5° to 54.2° cutoff
• Fresnel lens (in house): 9° to 55° zoom, 8.9° to 54° field, 13.4° to 60.4° cutoff
• Gobos: two wheels of 7 rotating and indexing glass, plus a 360° animation wheel
• Framing and FX: 4 blackout blades with ±45° index and ±120° rotation, 31 macros, dual rotating prisms, two frost filters, motorized iris
• Dimming: 16-bit, four curves, Ultra Dimming at 25 kHz for camera work
• Fan modes: Auto, High, Low, Studio, Mute, plus Theater Mode
• Movement: 540° pan, 260° tilt, 16-bit
• Control: DMX, RDM, Art-Net, sACN, Aria X2 wireless, 43 or 65 channel modes
• Connections: IP65 locking power in, DMX and Ethernet in and out
• Power: 1,400 W max, 100 to 240 V
• Rating: IP54, indoor and temporary outdoor, ambient -4°F to 113°F
• Fixture: 70.5 lb, 17.5 x 12.4 x 26.8 in
• Rigging: two 180 mm omega brackets included, two M12 clamp points

We carry 24 units, available now, with 24 Fresnel lens kits, so any fixture in the package can go either way.

Why it’s in the fleet

Elation doesn’t publish a decibel figure for this fixture. They publish a menu instead.

Five fan modes, each with its output cost stated up front. Auto runs the fans only as hard as the engine needs. Low quiets things down and holds around 80% output. Studio shuts nearly every fan off and runs near 50%. Mute drops to about 25%. Theater Mode layers on top of any of them and slows the motors themselves, because on a fixture this size the movement makes noise too.

Here is why that matters more than it sounds. Half of 37,200 lumens is still around 18,600, more than plenty of full-size profiles manage flat out. Studio mode is not a crippled fixture. It is a full fixture’s worth of light with the fans effectively off, which is exactly the setting for a keynote, a panel, or anything where the room is quiet and the camera is rolling.

Twenty-four of them, ready now. If you are building a plot and want to talk through profile versus Fresnel before it is locked, give us a call.