How do different strobes differ?
There are a lot of strobes out there. The year 2000 seemed to be The Year of the Cheap Strobe – I got one for free when I bought some lighting gells. It’s quite natural to ask – what’s the difference between all these units? • power output The output power of a strobe is usually rated in “Watt-Seconds”. This is sometimes incorrectly reported as “Watts”. Most cheap strobes are 20 Watt-Seconds. 20 doesn’t sound like much, but all of that energy is released at once, usually while you are in the dark, so it hits fairly hard. • flash rate It is more difficult to build a strobe that flashes rapidly than one that fires slowly. You have to worry about rapidly recharging the capacitors. You have to worry about the xenon tube getting hot. This amounts to a different technical design, and higher grade of components. If a really fast flash rate is important to your application, expect to pay more for it. But for simple haunt applications, most standard strobes will work fine. • adjustable flash ra
