ETC have announced their acquisition of the Selador product line from Selador co-founders Rob Gerlach and Novella Smith. Selador line-up products are available from Jands .
According to Fred Foster, CEO, ETC, they did not want to make a RGB or RGBA product that did not provide the kind of innovation in lighting they strive for. With its exclusive x7 Color System, the Selador product line produces a far superior quality of colour and light to anything that they had seen before in LEDs.
The product offerings that Selador and ETC combined will bring to the marketplace are orders of magnitude promising than anything they could have done on their own. They worked hard to develop a line of products and ETC are already positioned in the same way in the marketplace. Customers recognise that ETC represent high quality and good value for the investment.
Selador x7 Color System seven-hue technology produces a light and colour quality that conventional LED systems cannot duplicate. This unique colour system produces bright broad spectrum whites and intense colours well, rendering pigments and skin tones in a more natural way.
ETC have already integrated colour matching and HSI (hue, saturation and intensity) control of Selador products into the latest software releases of the Eos and Congo lighting control console lines. The architectural systems will follow shortly, and they will continue to innovate in the areas of colour management in these products.
Selador's line-up includes the Paletta and Lustr products, introduced at LDI 2008. Paletta fixtures' blend of seven colours of LEDs was selected to provide the depth of colour the customer can get from their favourite saturated gels. The Lustr line uses a different blend of colours that are optimised for producing broad spectrum whites and tinted colours – solving the traditional LED problem of making people look unnatural.
Lustr is also suitable for studio lighting as a key or fill light and can produce the subtle, tinted colours that lighting designers value highly. At the same time that ETC are revealing this purchase of the Selador product line, they are also debuting the latest Selador product: the high-output colour-mixing Vivid LED fixture series. The Vivid series combines the Selador x7 Color System with powerful K2 emitters from Luxeon, for the output available.
ETC were impressed by the extent to which Selador LEDs blend seamlessly with other lighting in a rig. A big part of that is the control system built into the Selador fixtures for really butter-smooth dimming and good fade-matching to ETC Source Four fixtures and other conventional lighting equipment.
The ETC/Selador agreement means that ETC will now own, manufacture and distribute the Selador product line. Gerlach and Smith have been retained as exclusive consultants to ETC to develop more products from the line. ETC plans to dedicate a substantial portion of their research and development budgets to LED technology and the development of enhanced control and power infrastructures for LED systems.
Selador fixtures will be sold in the U.S. immediately and are expected to be introduced in the Australian market during the second quarter of 2009. The ETC/Selador deal also involves the licensing of the Philips Color Kinetics patent portfolio as well as other patents owned by David Cunningham.