Sharpy vs Ultimo Sharpy: Everything You Need to Know About Claypaky’s Reborn Beam Icon

There are very few fixtures in the lighting world that can claim true icon status. The original Claypaky Sharpy is one of them. It didn’t just become popular. It became the poster child for high-energy programming and rewrote the rules for aerial looks. It showed up everywhere from club rigs to the Super Bowl. When someone said “beam,” you pictured a Sharpy.

Claypaky Ultimo Sharpy Overview: A Reinvention of a Modern Classic

If the first Sharpy was revolutionary, the Ultimo Sharpy is evolutionary. Claypaky kept the recognizable form factor but upgraded almost every subsystem possible. The Ultimo Sharpy is over 60% percent brighter, fully IP66-rated, faster, tighter, and finally equipped with full CMY color mixing. Pan and tilt are much faster, and pan is continuous.

One of the most interesting parts of the Ultimo Sharpy isn’t the motion system or the IP rating. It’s the decision Claypaky made at the core of the fixture: sticking with a short-arc HID lamp in a world where almost everything else has gone LED or laser. Claypaky built the Ultimo around a custom 250W OSRAM short-arc lamp with a tiny 0.8mm arc gap. That’s where the punch comes from to fill the 140 mm (5.5") lens. Short-arc HID still delivers five to ten times higher luminance than LED, and that intensity is what gives a beam fixture its identity. The color temp sits around 8400K with a CRI in the high 70s—solid beam fixture territory—but the updated electronics, cooling, and lamp driver give it a surprisingly long real-world life of up to 6,000 hours with typical show-cycle use.

Modern Optics & Expanded Color Capabilities

If you programmed the original Sharpy, you know the limitations of its color wheel. The Ultimo fixes that with full CMY color mixing. It’s the single feature LDs have been begging for since the beginning. Smooth transitions, camera-friendly saturation, and the ability to blend without swinging through abrupt wheel steps. The color mixing is wicked fast, fast enough for a snappy color effect. The Ultimo finally reads as a creative tool for television, film, and anything where gradients matter. It changes the identity of the fixture: the Ultimo Sharpy is a full-color beam engine.

The new optical system also plays nicely with everything Claypaky stacked in front of it. CMY, fixed colors, gobos, dual prisms, (a thicker) frost—they all sit downstream of that high-luminance source, so stacking effects doesn’t collapse the output the way it used to on older arc fixtures.

"Claypaky worked hard to give designers and programmers a fixture that offered noticeable upgrades and enhancements to the original Sharpy without making it too large and cumbersome. I think the Claypaky Engineering team did an amazing job of meeting these expectations with the Ultimo Sharpy.” - Product Specialist George Masek

IP66 Rating: Built for Real-World Touring and Outdoor Life

The original Sharpy was a workhorse, but it lived in a world of domes, trash bags, rain hoods, and frantic overnight service. It was never designed to survive modern festival life.

As part of the SHIELD Family, the Ultimo Sharpy carries a full IP66-rated housing. No domes. No panic when the sky opens up twenty minutes before doors. Rain, dust, haze slurry, confetti dumps; it’s built for all of it.

And this protection doesnt slow the fixture down. Both pan (which is conintuous now) and tilt are much faster than the original. It is impressive to watch the fixture stop at any moment.

And the hidden win: service intervals stretch way longer. Tours get more consistency. Venues get less downtime. LDs get fixtures that can live on roofs, delays, and outdoor structures without fear.

In the Wild: Playboi Carti’s “Antagonist” Tour

The first time we saw the Ultimo Sharpy in the wild was on Playboi Carti’s “Antagonist 2.0” tour—arguably the most stress-testing environment you could put a beam fixture in. No color. No soft looks. Just pure atmospheric chaos and maximum beamage.

LD Marcus Jessup selected the Ultimo precisely because he needed the punch and precision of a Sharpy, but with modern capabilities the original never had. Infinite movement let him program rotating sweeps and spirals that filled the venue. The beam density meant every look felt physically heavier. And even after hours of movement and heat, each unit stayed locked in, sharp, and ready to rip again.

“I wanted something with infinite pan that could also be a workhorse,” LD Marcus Jessup told us. “The optics are unbeatable, and it keeps the show dynamic with that aggressive beam signature.”

One of the biggest creative upgrades in the Ultimo Sharpy is infinite pan. The original Sharpy was fast, but it still lived within the limits of a mechanical end stop. The Ultimo removes that ceiling entirely.

Side-by-Side: Where the Difference Really Shows Up

We set the original Sharpy and the Ultimo Sharpy side by side, pointed them into the air, and let the beams speak for themselves. On paper the Ultimo is 66% brighter, and that spec translates to a real world difference. In real-world rigs, it’s the difference between a beam that holds up against LED walls and one that disappears. Outdoors, it’s the confidence to design for daylight conditions without compromising your look. Indoors, it means you can layer prism, frost, gobos, and CMY without watching brightness evaporate.

You can literally see the reshaped optics at work: the beam is tighter, heavier, and more uniform, almost like the light has more physical weight to it. The original still has that familiar punch, but the Ultimo looks like the modern version of what your memory thinks the Sharpy used to be.

From Us: Practical Upgrades LDs Will Care About

The biggest visual change up close: the beam fills the entire lens. Side by side, the Ultimo looks more unified and refined. It’s cleaner. Halo-free. More collimated. Claypaky clearly rebuilt the engine around beam quality, not brute force. When you stand in front of it, the beam fills the entire 140mm lens in a way the original Sharpy couldn’t, even at its best.

Claypaky recently added a Low-Noise Mode to the Ultimo Sharpy via firmware update, reducing operating noise by up to 7 dB while keeping roughly 90 % of the fixture’s output. It’s a small but meaningful upgrade for theaters, broadcast spaces, and quieter environments where fan noise can be a dealbreaker. Same punch. Same beam. Just noticeably quieter—and available for all existing units with a quick update.

A "Sharpy Emualtion Mode" allows you to add the fixture to existing sharpy programming. A slick detail that is good to know about.

Claypaky also nailed a small but meaningful detail—the built-in spacing bar. It folds down

from the base to lock center-to-center rigging perfectly. No eyeballing. No tape measure. Faster hangs. Cleaner lines. A tiny update with a big impact, especially for tours flipping between truss and ground packages.

The Sharpy Legacy, Evolved the Way LDs Wanted

Putting the Ultimo Sharpy next to the original makes one thing obvious: it is a response to everything today’s LDs expect a beam fixture to be. The DNA is the same, the silhouette, the attitude, the unmistakable beam presence, but every meaningful limitation of the original has been answered. The new optical engine is tighter. The HID source delivers the kind of luminance LED still cannot match. CMY turns the Sharpy from a one-look monster into a true creative tool. IP66 protection takes it places the original could never survive. And in the air, side by side, you see exactly why this reimagining needed to exist.

The original Sharpy defined a generation of rigs. The Ultimo Sharpy feels like the version built for the next one. Not a relic. Not a reboot. A modern beam fixture with the punch of the past and the performance LDs demand today. And if our own side-by-side test proved anything, it is that the Ultimo does not just carry the Sharpy name, it has earned it.