Blog? Who came up with this word anyway. It sounds profane. Blog the blogging bloggers!
Anyway, here's my update...
Out of nowhere we find a new addition to LDI in the form of Komaden a Tokyo based company who is showing one of the more interesting LED/Video products on the showfloor. They're Image-Mesh screens are akin to the plastic mesh fencing that you would find on a ski slope when they close off trails. Instead of being a traditional orange these pieces of mesh fencing are black with LEDs mounted on the face at 25mm intervals. This obviously lets you see through the video image somewhat like the G-LEC panels. Their Kapas II product is somewhat similar with the exception that the runs of LEDs are in cluster nodes and mounted to runs of belt making it flexible. The Kapas II is also completely submersible. Pricing for this product is estimated to be 30 days away but they expect it to be competitive with the G-LEC style product lines.
Western Startlight is offering the Fogscreen (www.fogscreen.com). This is exactly what the name implies. A screen of light haze that you can use as a rear projection surface. It looks like something out of a science fiction movie and, if I'm not mistaken, comes in 10' lengths.
Osram-Sylvania is showing their Colormix-Flex product. A very thin belt-tape style LED strip that can be custom cut to various lengths and is fully RGB controllable. They have a several different coverings for it to frost the emission of the light sources.
Martin Professional is debuting their Maxxyz PC software to the US market. It's basically the Maxxyz console as an offline editor and playback device. It's slick and certainly fits the bill nicely since all of their main console competitors also offer this. What's setting it apart from the rest is another software package that allows you to manage this through custom html interfaces. This basically means that you can have an extremely simply graphical user interface created from webpage building software for custom installations. If you've got a client that would be considered dangerous if they started pressing every button on the screen then you can narrow down their choices by only giving them the playback cuelists that they should be accessing by simply making an html page with an appropriate quantity of buttons. They've also come up with some interesting ways to interface GPS systems to all of this which is of particular interest to those of you who are working on cruise ships and need to keep track of time-of-day changes in your lighting systems. Of course, once all of this is setup you can also manage this PC based console from the internet anywhere in the world. Pretty hip indeed!
Martin (USA) is also showing the Big-Lites single-arm xenon searchlights which they do not manufacture but have taken on distribution for. Their just what the name implies. Big. Heavy. Bright. Scroller colormixing is plus as well.