Paul C. Buff, Inc. Technical Forum

Is it possible to use Elinchrom flashtubes in Alien Bees? I would like to try and eliminate a magenta tint, and have a reasonable match to my Elinchroms.

Elinchrom uses only 300V, so even if you could make their tubes fit, you would have excessive current, short life and a much higher color temperature if you plugged them into a 500V AB system. Tubes are not generally interchangeable from system to system.

Under what circumstances are you getting a magenta cast? Typically, a custom white balance will solve this.

TS

The difficulty in using both Alien Bees and Elinchroms is that if you balance white for one, the other is off.

Assuming the tubes work (and they won't) the tube itself is only part of the story. The votage going through the tube will affect color temperature, and since the Elinchrome tube was not optimized for the Bees, that would greatly affect the color temperature (again, assuming it worked at all). Additionally, modifiers and any ambient color can also greatly affect the color temperature.

If it isolated to the head (or head and modifier, and changing modifiers is out of the question) you can gel one of the lights to match (at least closely). Lee filters (and probably Rosco) has good online resources to find the appropriate filter.

TS