11am on Sunday September 10th at PLASA 2006 in London will see the launch of Lancelot, the latest in a long line of lighting products from French manufacturer Robert Juliat. The launch will take place at stand G25, the stand of Juliat’s UK distributor White Light.

The brightest fixture ever released by Robert Juliat, Lancelot is both a long-throw effects projector and a followspot for the largest of venues, particularly stadiums. Based around a 360,000 lumen 4kW HTI lamp, Lancelot uses a carefully-designed optical train that gives an extremely flat-field beam distribution. Lancelot’s modular design allows up to five effects cassettes to be inserted: based around a totally new four-blade design these allow progressive effects such as frost or color correction. Further effects will be available for Lancelot during 2007, including strobing, a six-slot gobo wheel, motorized zoom, a moving mirror head and more, many either locally controlled by an operator or remotely controlled via DMX.

The Lancelot by Robert Juliat.

Lancelot retains many familiar Robert Juliat features, such as the six-way boomerang color changer, fan cooled to maximize color life, the built-in dimmer shutter with rotary handle for smooth dimming control, the fully-closing iris, and the self-locking focus handles. Lancelot has also been designed for easy set-up, with a fixed front lens for better balance setting and an easy-to-balance counterweight, and easy maintenance, with the dimmer and iris modules and mirror, lamphouse and double-condenser optics removable and all parts of the lantern readily accessible.

Private testing by Robert Juliat and White Light at Twickenham Stadium earlier in the year proved just how spectacular the Lancelot is, either used as a followspot or as a high quality gobo projector, delivering clear, bright, even images from the highest reaches of the stadium to the playing field below. “Even though we’re used to Robert Juliat’s superb optics, the performance of the Lancelot over the huge throws at Twickenham quite blew us away,” comments White Light’s managing director, Bryan Raven. “We’ve been keenly awaiting the final product ever since, and are delighted that we are able to host the launch at this year’s PLASA Show.”