The LED staff has been around for a while now. I remember back in the day, Aerotech had some LED staffs that were pretty great for that time. I'm talking 15 years ago.
They did cost $1100+ though.
Then Flowtoys had their staffs. Modular system that you filled with the flowlights. They were kind of cool, but still at around $300-$400 for a staff, it was a bit much. Plus you had to turn off all those lights, and they only did one color combo.
Then there was the original Concentrate staff. These were pretty good. They only required one light in each end, and were super bright with great color options. But still cost a bit at around $285 plus they had that mad wobble!
Fast forward to 2016 and we have the emergence of the LED strip lighting. This strip lighting is very cool. Each LED is individually addressable, which means that through the software you can control each light in the strip, which opens up a whole new world of possibilities. (i.e. pixel poi!)
So as great as this tech is, we still don't really have a solid offering available at a reasonable price. We just purchased what we hoped might be a good option from a manufacturer in Europe. 3 or 4 minutes in and it was broken.
This is a bit of a common theme. These new staffs are still in their infancy. Though this is no doubt the future.
Also this year was purchased the Concentrate brand and did some work on making the original Concentrate staffs the best they could be.
We removed the fiber optic (expensive!) and managed to make them brighter using a much more efficient method. We added optical brightener to the PolyCarb tube. This meant the light went right to the edges of the outer tube, made it lighter (less wobble) and also made it much cheaper.
So we took the original $285 Concentrate staff and made it brighter, stiffer, improved the light settings a heap and got the price down to $99!!
So right now we have a super bright, super strong, reachargeable battery operated LED staff for $99AUD. That's like $74USD.
This is one very solid product for an epic price that is available right now.
We have plans to do something great with the LED strip lighting in the future, but it is still new tech and this will take a couple of years at least to bring out something that really competes well with the functionality and value of the current generation Concentrate C5 staffs.
But the future is looking pretty bright! Literally ;)
Looking forward to see what evolves out of this. Exciting times to be spinning things.
Peace
Jason