ETC’s Massive Milestone: Three Million Source Four Luminaires Shipped

Look up into almost any professional lighting rig today and you will likely see an ETC Source Four brand fixture: a Source Four spotlight, a Source Four PAR washlight, a Source Four Fresnel, a Source Four Zoom, a Source Four Revolution moving light, a Source Four PARNel, a Source Four jr spotlight, a long life Source Four HID spotlight, a Source Four MultiPAR batten, a Source Four XT outdoor spotlight or now a Source Four LED spotlight.

That’s because three million Source Four fixtures are out there, in theatres, TV studios, museums, opera houses, school and universities, and everywhere in between.

The Source Four ‘classic’ incandescent spotlight will be 20 years old in autumn. Introduced at the 1992 LDI tradeshow and sweeping that year’s product awards, the fixture is now a mainstay of conventional lighting in rigs everywhere.

“For lighting designers, the Source Four has almost become a photometrics reference point, a unit of light,” says ETC’s David Lincecum. “They know how much light they’ll get from the first electric, and that’s a shared language of light output.”

This year ETC introduced a much anticipated and well received LED version of its classic spotlight – combining the advantages of the revered Source Four optics with the colour system and further energy efficiencies of an ETC Selador LED luminaire. A rig of these was recently employed in the temporary London studio of France TV Sport for the Olympics. (Lincecum adds that the ‘three million shipped’ number does not include the thousands of Source Four LEDs sold since their introduction earlier this year.)

The success of the Source Four line lies in its adaptation and evolution, says ETC CEO Fred Foster: “We upgrade these tools in the lighting professionals’ toolbox and we invent new ones as new technologies emerge, so that for any lighting design need, there’s the right Source Four in the toolbox.”