Best lighting desk for around £200

norty303 wrote: P.s. buy the MagicDMX dongle and a cheap ELO touchscreen, you'd be surprised how far this combo will take you

Got this but to be honest I found it difficult to use and gave up in the end. Wish I could have a basic one to one tutorial with someone to get to grips with it! Lighting control with Dmx in general confuses me! (Not ashamed to say)

I only suggested ELO because:
1. They are robust for a gig environment, with a good solid base and hard wearing screen which can tilt flat for when you're standing up.
2. They come up on ebay 2nd hand for £50 to £100 regularly (it is the serial version, use a cheap USB to serial adaptor) I paid under £200 for both my 1525's

Got this but to be honest I found it difficult to use and gave up in the end.

Read the manual, learn the terminology, use for 8 hours, go back and read the manual.
Approach it as you would a dedicated piece of hardware, i.e. completely remove the fact it's running on Windows from your mind.
If you can use Chamsys, you can have a pretty good stab at Avo, Hog, etc
Cues, cue stacks, playbacks, attributes, palettes are all standard fare in DMX control world.

Yes, pound for pound, Chamsys and a touch screen are THE most cost effective and flexible system going at the moment. Remember however, its nothing like using a mixing desk, its like learning a whole new piece of software like Photoshop and at the end of the day, what would you rather use? Windows Paint or Photoshop? Stick with it and feel free to ask questions on here, there are plenty of user's on here who are happy to help and loads of good tutorials on line.

gotta find a good laptop for it now

It doesn't need a good laptop to run MagicQ. A half fit hamster in a wheel will do it nicely The visualiser will take a few more resources but you're better off running that on another machine over your network anyway.

I run mine on a single core Atom

Edited by norty303 - 02 May 2013 at 1:34pm

if you want a really good rugged gigging laptop which can stop bullets & is literally hewn out of magnesium for the millitary, check the panasonic toughbook range on ebay:

The CF 29 is a nice size (13.3" screen) and the value sweetspot between price and performance right now £150 to 190 delivered. you can spend more, you can spend less on other models.. but i rather reccomend them:

Review:
http://www.trustedreviews.com/panasonic-toughbook-cf-29-rugged-notebook_Laptop_review

Also, some models also come with a passive touchscreen onboard too, which you have to use a stylus with ..not everyones going to like that, but you can still plug in an external screen or retrofit a conventional touch surface onto it :)




Edited by nineleaves - 02 May 2013 at 4:58pm

Not quite as rugged as the Toughbook, but still with all the goodies like semi waterproof keyboard, shock protected disk, titanium chassis, keyboard light, etc are the T series Thinkpads. £150 to £250 on eBay depending on spec. I've got a 3 year old (to me) T61 that I bought for £225 with Core2Duo 2ghz, 2GB RAM, which was 2.5 years old when I bought it, but still had 6 month onsite warranty remaining (corporate support contracts FTW!)

My Chamsys runs on an Acer Revo that is piggybacked on one of my touch screens. I find its a bit less desirable to nick than a laptop too ;)