Arc Light zoomie?

[Katherine Alicia]

This is more of a "Would it work?" question really.

My Fire Foxes FF4 HID light comes with a 67mm threaded bezel that`s quite capable of taking camera lenses!
So... I was wondering if I added a camera "Hood" and an aspheric 67mm screw in lens if I could turn it into a much better thrower?
it`s already a great thrower as it is, but it has a lot of flood too, so I was thinking about how a Zoomie works and wondered if I could apply that to a HID light, so instead of seeing a LED chip you`d see an arc light instead :devil:

so it would be: Light ---> Extension hood ---> Aspheric lens

naturally I don`t want to spend nearly £50 on a load of parts that won`t work because the I`d overlooked something, so... Would it work?

 

[marcdilnutt]

You might need to play with extension tubes to get the arc at the focal point of the lens but there is no technical reason why that wouldn't work, unless I am really missing something. The camera lens is designed to focus light on to a point on the camera's sensor so if you can put a HID arc at that point it should work. My last physics lesson was more than a couple of years ago though so I could be wrong!

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[DIWdiver]

I'm not an optics guy, but know enough to be dangerous. I very much doubt it's possible to turn flood, or 'spill' into hotspot without ruining the hotspot. In a decently designed HID, this would reduce the throw, not increase it. If you had an HID with a POS reflector (or none at all) you could use a lens to generate a very narrow beam, but in general reflectors can capture a much higher fraction of the light from an arc than lenses can. The same is NOT true of LEDs.

This is why HIDs almost always use reflectors, and LEDs more often use lenses.

You might be able to focus your hotspot slightly better, but you'd need a long focal length for that. And you might be better off with spherical instead of aspheric.