ChamSys QuickQ 30+ DMX lighting desk

General

Standing behind a lighting desk for the first time is a moment of mild panic for most people: buttons, faders, a screen full of terms you have never seen, and a venue that fills up within the hour. The ChamSys QuickQ series was made for exactly that moment, for people without years of programming behind them who still want a stage, hall or church lit properly. The QuickQ 30+ takes you through setting up, programming and finally playing back your show, with dimmers, LED colour mixing and moving heads all within reach.

A screen that works like your phone

At the heart of the QuickQ 30+ sits an 11.6-inch multi-touch screen, and the way you work it is deliberately modelled on a smartphone: you zoom, scroll and tap with your fingers, pick shades from a colour picker and see icons rather than cryptic abbreviations. If you do get stuck, built-in videos talk you through it. Below the screen are twenty multifunction fixture faders, ten master playback faders with bump buttons for a quick flash, and four attribute encoders for adjusting colour, position and other properties. The cue stack and chase system stays clear, so your show reads as a logical sequence instead of a puzzle, and you can connect a full HD HDMI monitor for extra overview.

From four DMX outputs to growing into MagicQ

The back of the console is where the real work happens. Four RDM outputs on 5-pin XLR give you four universes directly, and six once you work over the network with Art-Net or sACN. RDM Autopatch recognises suitable fixtures and patches them for you, and with more than 60,000 fixture files in the library yours is almost certainly included. Scan the QR code on the display and your phone or tablet connects over the built-in wifi to the free QuickQ app, so you can aim fixtures from the middle of the hall. Would you rather program at home on the sofa? Then use the free offline designer software for Mac and Windows. And if you outgrow the console, your show loads into a MagicQ system.