SDG #043 Clay Paky Golden Scan HMI 1200 Scanner Stage Light

The Clay Paky Golden Scan HMI 1200 is a piece of 1990s touring lighting hardware that still turns up cheap on the used market, and this project shows both why that is tempting and why it is not a casual buy. These are mirror scanners rather than moving heads: a 1200W HMI discharge lamp sits fixed in the body while colour wheels, gobos, an iris and a dimmer/shutter assembly shape the beam before it hits a fast pan and tilt mirror. That layout gives extremely quick beam movement and a very bright, hard edged output, but it also means high running temperatures, a magnetic ballast that makes the fixture heavy, and consumable optics that degrade with age.

The refurbishment work covered here is the realistic picture of owning one: checking and reforming the electronics, dealing with heat damaged wiring and connectors, cleaning smoked optics and dichroics, servicing the stepper driven effects wheels, and confirming lamp strike and ignition behaviour before trusting the fixture in a rig.

The more broadly useful part is the control problem. Early Clay Paky fixtures use PMX rather than modern DMX512, so a stock desk will not talk to them. Building a DMX to PMX converter is a neat piece of practical protocol work: read the incoming DMX universe, remap the relevant channels, and re-time the output to suit the older signalling. Anyone rescuing vintage stage lighting will hit a similar wall, and a small microcontroller based translator is usually cheaper and more flexible than hunting down a period correct controller.

If you want a big beam for a small budget and enjoy restoration work, these scanners are rewarding. If you want plug and play, a modern LED head makes more sense.