Botex DC-2448 Light Operator

I have a few of these desks which are predominantly used for small theatre / small stage use. The lower set of faders can be programmed as scenes which is really helpful when leaving the lights to an inexperienced operator or for fast access by a sound engineer who has other things to worry about during a gig. Build quality is decent but the faders are fairly stiff. This unit is made by botex, but identical desks seem to be also made under the badge of other manufacturers - e.g. GLP / American DJ so if your operators already have experience of those desks then they'll be able to use this one just as easily

Solidly built and with the ability to preprogramme the lower 24 channels as different chases over a number of fixtures and run them together in any combination at the flick of a fader makes busking a convincing lightshow a pretty straightforward affair with no prep time required even for a band you haven't seen before. Add step, button, adjustable pre programmed independent chase speed and audio step triggering and you are not really short of anything much, one hell of a lot of bang for your buck. The only drawbacks are that even though you have 4 separate pages of chases, you can't copy and paste chases between pages to copy elements of shows (not that I have found anyway!), and no USB to back up or load / save shows, so if you are full, you have to delete one page and reprogramme the new show from first principles step by step. You also need to power it up once a month for a couple of hours to charge the onboard backup battery so it doesn't forget all your chases, but apart from that it does one hell of a lot more than far more expensive desks, and can't fault it at the price.