When Saturday Night Live and James Cordon’s Late Late Show are making use of the product in their intro and bumpers, you know there’s something special there. Looking at the examples on the Pixelstick website, you can clearly see the massive potential for this product. You trigger your art and lights using the conveniently orange-colored “Fire” button placed near the LCD screen. The controller’s power toggle is a mechanical rocker switch which sits atop the remote, making it easy to find in the dark. You can adjust several different options directly on the Pixelstick’s very clear and easy-to-use controller to help reproduce the chosen image properly within your composition, including: brightness, speed, orientation, direction, countdown timer, white balance, and a few other more advanced options. Then, as you walk through the frame of your camera, the Pixelstick’s LEDs fire on and off, creating vertical lines of color that combine to reproduce the image you selected. After setting your camera to a long shutter speed-something above 2 seconds works best-you load an image through the controller of the Pixelstick. The basis of how the Pixelstick operates is actually kind of simple. Still, despite the very few criticisms I have, the Pixelstick is a solid and well-built product. Light painters tend to be a pretty good DIY group, so I feel most will solve this problem themselves, but it would have been nice to see a 90° angle pole attachment included.
Whereas, when you’re printing images, a longer, even angled arm would’ve come in handy. Yes, the spinning sleeve is pretty cool, but it will remain locked if you’re printing images.
I would, however, suggest that the handle is a bit lacking in design thought as an aid in making creative photos.
It’s here that the lightness of the Pixelstick shines, because not once in all the times I used it-even one night making attempt, after attempt… after attempt-did my arms begin to fatigue. The handle mounts firmly and nothing felt loose as I waved it about, somewhat violently at times, running back and forth through the frame. It would have been nice to be able to quickly flick on a bright light on the stick itself, rather than have dig out my iPhone or carry an actual flashlight around. Too many times during my tests did one of the little black screws come loose and fall to the ground, nearly lost to me forever. When you consider the notion that the Pixelstick will be primarily used in the dark, it would have been nice to see at least one or two white, flashlight LEDs embedded on the rear of the metal frame, switched on independently of the front LEDs. It may be fine when it’s 80° outside, but a few of the nights we went out to test the Pixelstick were at or near freezing, making a battery change a very, very painful experience for my poor hands. This battery compartment needs a better solution, plain and simple. Powering each of the 200 LEDs are 8 AA’s in a holder that needs to be (at least mine did) forcefully squeezed into the hard cloth compartment mounted to the frame of the pixel stick. Thankfully, the Pixelstick doesn’t do anything proprietary, fancy, or backward for a power supply. This is a hard prediction to make, I know, but there’s probably enough strength and, maybe more importantly, just enough flex in the frame to allow leeway for when that dreaded drop or other accident inevitably happens. The aluminum frame of the Pixelstick is very sturdy, and I don’t foresee anyone having general build issues with it down the road. But nothing that makes me think the Pixelstick isn’t worth every penny of the $350 asking price. Fortunately, that doesn’t seem to be the case.Įverything about the Pixelstick feels well done and quite thought-out. The first thing that I always evaluate when I tackle a product like this-especially one with no real competition-is build quality.īeing first to market, the first model produced by Bitbanger Labs, I hoped this wouldn’t be a “yeah it’s great but it broke in one week” sort of product.
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