Have you heard of Eliminator Lighting? We first featured the brand back in i119 (May/June 2023) when they had just released the Vortex to the UK market.

As a well-established brand supplying affordable lighting and effects equipment to the DJ and club market for over fifteen years, the company has an extensive product catalogue that includes LED pars, effect lights, moving heads and free-standing illuminated letters as well as fog and bubble machines.

Since acquiring the Eliminator Lighting line in 2019, ADJ has pushed to make the brand more visible in their US and Mexico markets. And at the end of 2021, with the world emerging from the Covid pandemic, the company moved the entire Eliminator Lighting range to the main adj.com website.

As a sub-brand of ADJ, distribution in the UK and Ireland is handled by Audio Visual Security (AVS), a move made in 2023 with the aim to improve delivery times (including next-day delivery for retailers) to ensure DJs quickly get the latest products and faster repairs. The range is growing quickly and currently has some 44 products in its portfolio, though not all are currently available in the UK market.

The focus of this review is the Eliminator Stryker Beam – one of six moving heads in the range. Designed to generate stunning aerial effects, the Stryker Beam is a dedicated moving head beam fixture that utilises a 100W LED light source and comes with an extensive feature set. It’s a versatile, great value-for-money moving head that creates a wide variety of mid-air beam effects – ideal for mobile entertainers and event companies looking for a portable lighting solution.

At just 12.8kg (28.4lbs) and 464mm at its largest dimension, the Stryker Beam packs a punch for a fixture in this class. Powered by a 100W LED, it offers a 6-degree beam angle to deliver an incredibly bright, focused beam. You can also change things up using one of the supplied gobos or prism wheels, or adjust the focus via the menu panel or DMX – all features that I’ll go through in this review.

Starting with the outside, the Stryker Beam is a decent-looking large moving head – as expected – with Eliminator branding on the panel and main unit, but it’s not in your face ( something I’ve aways hated). The overall size is 292mm (l) x 303mm (w) x 464mm (h) (11.5” (l) x 11.9” (w) x 18.3” (h)). The front of the unit features a digital screen with four push buttons on the right-hand side: ESC (no/back), UP, DOWN and SET (yes/enter).
Layout of the menu is a little different from the norm, with three options either side of the centre screen. The UP and DOWN buttons allow you to move between, whilst SET lets you enter change modes, set channels and select other functions. Once you get your head around it, the system menu is quite intuitive.

MODE is for setting the SCENE mode – it’s another word for MANUAL, but it has 10 scenes that you can manually set within the screen and you can also set a scene time of 0-25 seconds, if you want to move between those scenes automatically. For all those manual users, you have the primary/secondary (master/slave) options here. Furthermore, AUTO is set by default, so you can just plug and play.

DISP allows you to set the screen brightness, screen saver mode, and screen rotation (if you are flying the fixture), whilst DMX indicates modes for quick diagnosis of a DMX connection. ADDR is for setting your DMX channel 001-512.

SCENE/MANUAL allows you to access scenes 1-10 and the different channels within the fixture, as well as setting a fade time. ADVA gives you access to pan/tilt inversion, data hold (if DMX signal is lost) and reset modes, as well as giving you the option to offset scene time.

STAT is really for the nerds of us! You can view all the stepper info, fixture status, temperature, software version, and the main thing that DJs really care about – the LED time. Another handy feature here is the serial number, which it seems cannot be changed – useful in the sad case of theft.

On each side of the case are carry handles, which you’ll need with the 12.8kg (29lbs) of weight.
On the bottom of the unit are four omega bolts, and the mounting bracket itself is also included. On the back, you have PowerCON in and out, and the options of both 3-pin and 5-pin DMX, making the Stryker Beam a well-loaded fixture. The unit is equipped with large rubber feet for easy placement and a safety cable loop is also provided. Next to the output power, you’ll find an easy-to-access replaceable fuse.

Internally, apart from that LED engine, is a metal gobo wheel with 11 gobo options plus open. A motorised focus function also means patterns can be kept sharp, regardless of the projection distance, and the fixture also offers a shake function that can be engaged for any of the gobos.
It’s important to note that two of the gobos are beam reducers. There are also two rotating prisms – 8-facet and 16-facet – and the fixture does allow for prism layering. You have full 540-degree pan and 270-degree tilt action, along with 16-bit fine control (should you require that much precision). The colour wheel features 13 colours plus open, along with a 6-colour flag for multi-colour effects. The 6-colour flag is separate to the main colour wheel, combining red, green, blue, orange, purple and pink dichroics in a wedge-shaped pattern. This can also be used to generate a multi-coloured output, which looked awesome in use. The previously mentioned motorised focus can be controlled via the panel or DMX, whilst a frost filter delivers a 50-degree wash effect.
While the product does have a built-in auto mode and sound mode (and you can link units together via primary/secondary), I found these modes were random, strobe-heavy and super-fast. If I’m being honest, I believe a fixture of this type, with the advanced options available, should be controlled using DMX – and the Stryker Beam has 16- and 19-channel DMX modes. As many of you will know, I have a fascination with the Wolfmix W1 controller, and thankfully the Stryker Beam profile was already in the Wolfmix system. I also ran the fixture on the ADJ Link desk. On both controllers, the moving head has a beautiful, smooth movement.

The dimmer runs from 0-100% with zero drop off and the strobe runs from 0-20Hz, which with multiple units would take you back to 90s trance-land. The colour wheel delivers bright and vibrant colours through 13 dichroic filters (plus open white). It was interesting to note some random and new (to me) colours: one called Reseda, which looks the same as the green; a blue and a royal blue (I found it hard to spot the difference); and one that made me giggle – ‘silver’.
The metal gobo wheel features 11 patterns (plus open spot) and includes a good range of shapes like flowers, swirls, stars and dots. But for me it’s only when you use the 8-facet and 16-facet prisms that this moving head comes alive. The delight of prism layering takes this fixture up a step when compared to its competitors in the same market. The separate 6-colour flag allows for multi-colour effects. Add a bit of prism rotation and you are at the next level!

Whilst I couldn’t test the Stryker Beam on an actual event, as I only had one unit, I did enjoy having a good play with its features across two control desks in the office. I even took it outside at night, where I shot the light across the yard to produce a wide effect at distance – certainly a larger space than most dancefloors!

The new Eliminator Stryker Beam is a fantastic new light at an extremely competitive price point. Since ADJ took on the Eliminator brand, it’s taken a while for their products to reach us in the UK – but it was worth the wait. Now it really does feel as though they’re shaking up the DJ market.