What's A Good Brand Light Dimmer?

[Daniel Soderberg]

Planning to use a light dimmer on my Arri 300w Fresnel. Looking at this dimmer:
http://www.filmtools.com/american-de-rosa-full-range-slide-light-lamp-dimmer-6-500w-black-d3003.html

Opinions?

Thanks,
Daniel

 

[Dan Kanes]

Huge fan of this:

http://www.harborfreight.com/router-speed-control-43060.html

This is rated up to 15amps - which is just less than a 2k. I know it says router speed control - same thing. It's really excellent.

 

[Daniel Soderberg]

Thanks for the suggestion Dan. Any opinions on the one I'm looking at?

 

[Erik Bien]

Take Dan's advice: the router speed controllers include a dim/off/full switch and are cheaper, handle bigger loads, and don't get as hot as those little plastic hand squeezers.

 

[Justin Chin]

I like the Leviton dimmers. They're more expensive than the ones listed, but if you want to keep it you're entire career they're my favorite. Plus, it's easy to fix them if, by chance, something breaks. You live in SF go to the new JCX store and check out what Janet has. I love filmtools, but I Janet runs a great business as well.

 

[Dan Kanes]

My opinion is the slider style squeezer is crap.

The router speed control has a fuse... that's one thing it has over the leviton. Granted a Leviton is industry standard, but they burn out too.

 

[Daniel Soderberg]

Cool, thanks for the tips guys!
Justin, do you mind giving me a link to the model your talking about?

 

[David W. Jones]

+1 on the Harbor Freight Router controller.

 

[Ravi Kiran]

Do these dimmers cause a color temp shift?

 

[Richard Foster]

On Tungsten lighting yes. The dimmer you go, the lower the color temperature. Start at 3200K at full voltage down to 2400K or lower as you reduce voltage to say 50 V. There is a reference idea here for an A19 100 W light bulb. Hope this helps give you an idea.

http://members.misty.com/don/incchart.html