Rosco’s MIXBOOK is the “world’s first” digital gel swatchbook

Gel and lighting manufacturer Rosco has released the MIXBOOK. They say that it is the “world’s first digital swatchbook”. If you don’t know what swatchbooks are, the physical Rosco gel swatchbooks are essentially sample books of the different gels and materials that Rosco makes.

But as LED lighting has become more popular, and particularly coloured LEDs, demands have changed. Rosco’s MIXBOOK digital swatchbook is essentially the digital LED equivalent of the original gel swatchbooks. It’s a handheld LED unit (although it has a 1/4-20″ socket, too) that can create just about any colour of light you can imagine.

Its purpose apperas to be much as the old Swatchbooks was. To help you determine either what gels you need to get for your lights. But it also looks like it’s specifically intended for use with the DMG Lumiere MIX lights, too.

The MIXBOOK uses a proprietary six-chip LED system for a wide colour gamut including phosphor-coated Red, Green, Blue, White, phosphor-coated Amber and Lime. Over 130 True Rosco Color gels can be emulated by the MIXBOOK, and also by the DMG Lumiere MIX lights, which share the same six-chip technology.

Both the MIXBOOK and the Lumiere MIX lights are controlled by the myMIX app, allowing you to quickly transfer your colour settings from one to the other.

The app can also utilise your phone’s camera in order to reproduce any colour contained within an image it sees. This means you can find out the exact colour of a light source, and then determine what gels you might need to buy in order to change that light source into something else – perhaps to match two different light sources together or to create a specific colour for effect.

Rosco’s physical gel sample swatchbooks have been around for as long as I can remember. I’ve got a bag full of them here that I’ve collected over the years. I dig into them whenever I need to cover a small light like a speedlight or Litra Torch to correct them to balance them out with another light source or to just add a splash of creative colour.

I’d be interested to have a play with one of these at some point, just to see how easy or difficult it is to figure out the correct gels to use with a given light using the MIXBOOK vs just testing with the physical samples in the old swatch books.

I say I’d be interested, although Rosco doesn’t appear to have actually posted any information yet on how to actually get hold of one. They have a whole page on their website about the MIXBOOK, along with a Quick Start Guide and a complete user manual. But there are no clues as to what they cost or where we can get one.

We’ll keep you posted as we hear more.

[via No Film School]