Help: lw cs-1000 rgb and questions

[Barabba]

Hi all, thank you so much for your precious help!

I'm a bit disoriented cause I'm a newbie on laser effects, I'm renewing the light of my club and I need some suggestions, if I can ask you..

The club isn't big, one room of 15 x 6 meters, I evaluated some lasers effect on youtube and I liked lw EL-500 RGB, maybe this is enough powerful for the room, but I see that for only some euros more I can buy the CS-1000. I've a DMX line droven by Marting Lightjockey 2.95

Does the CS-1000 worth? Is it reliable machine in the time?
Can I use Lightjockey to drive it? There exist a fixture file to import it?
Which software you suggest me to create effects? And does it interface with DMX to program the laser? Or USB?
Once I built the effect, can I store it into laser memory and recall it from lightjockey by dmx?

What would you do if you have my issue? Any suggestion from your precious experience is welcome!
Thank you a lot!

 

[galinley]

Hi Barabba.

I use to 2 CS-1000RGB MkII lasers for my shows (usually around 5 hours per show). They are alright for the money. For $650USD, they definitely get the job done. Granted, if you're a big laser fan (like most of us on here), I'd recommend stepping up to a higher quality laser (more in the $2,000USD range). The CS-1000 is advertised with a scan rate of 30k pps, but really, they are more around the 16-20k pps scan rate. They are also TTL color lasers so you don't get more than 8 colors (even though they are RGB), so if you want to be able to make tons of different colors, look at a laser that has analog color mixing.

But, like I said, the CS-1000 is a great choice for the price. It has about 200 preset patterns you can activate via DMX, BUT, you cannot design any custom patterns using DMX, and you are pretty limited as to how you can control the preset patterns. You can however control alignment, size, beam/solid mix, etc.
Before I got the Pangolin FB3 and QuickShow, I was using ShowXpress to control them via DMX. I had to create a custom Fixture profile, but it was pretty easy (these lasers are only 11 channels each). I'm happy to email it to you and you can take a look at the raw file to see if it's compatible with your program.

Good luck!