Thread: American DJ LED Pinspot

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One of the biggest rookie mistakes is to not light up your effects. I have been accomplishing this for years with par cans. But their beams are not very tight and they are very unreliable.

For my holiday display last year, I tried 2 LED Pinspots from American DJ. These are available locally at Guitar Center or a million places online for $50. I left two of these out in the MD weather in rain and snow for over a month. At the end, they still worked perfectly.

They come with two lenses, so you can choose your beam width. However, both beams are much tighter than any parcan.

They are very light, do not get hot, and easily mounted.

They are very bright, but they can be dimmed using filter material.

This year, we will be buying about 10 of these for haunt lighting. I suggest everyone at least try them out.

For the Christmas effect, I used two of them reflecting off the back of a mirror ball and onto the house to create snow. The mirror ball was rotated using a rotisserie for grills.

There are some articles on advanced lighting at my website www.hauntit.com

Danny Clark

I agree about the lighting. We have been experimenting for the last few years with lighting. I made a bunch of small 5 LED spots a couple of years ago that worked pretty well for lighting tombstones and such but I wanted more control. For this year we made a move to DMX lighting for our main props. I think we have 16 RGB can lights, a few UV's and some strobes. Also I hacked a dozen $5 malibu lights from Home Depot and put in some MR16 bulbs with multiple blue LED's in the bulb. These I think will work very well in place of the other little lights I made. Early on in my experiments, I played around with white LED's and blue and purple gels. I never got them to work all that well.

I'm curious as to what a $50 pin spot looks like? Last week I hacked a dollar store LED pin and inserted a UV LED. Total cost $1.04

Originally Posted by walkingcorpse

I'm curious as to what a $50 pin spot looks like? Last week I hacked a dollar store LED pin and inserted a UV LED. Total cost $1.04

HAHA I did the exact same thing!

The difference is brightness. These are very bright, with a very focused beam. We put the props on one side of the trail and a light tree with the pinspots up about 10 feet high on the other side. The light fixtures themselves are way above the eyesight of the viewer and therefore do not detract from the prop. Without filter, the pinspots are too bright. But we like to light up each prop with two pinspots at 45 degree angles to the prop. The left is red and the right is blue. This gives a 3-D feel to the prop.

We also use the DMX LED par cans, but they spill way too much light for most purposes. We like the area between props to be perfectly dark.

Danny Clark

Originally Posted by walkingcorpse

I'm curious as to what a $50 pin spot looks like? Last week I hacked a dollar store LED pin and inserted a UV LED. Total cost $1.04

Tutorial please!