Fantastic small LED light

I've been looking at those too and they do look a good balance of size over power, you can get them slightly cheaper here but the non colour change version which has more power as both sets of LED's are available all the time: http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Power-LED-312A-6580lux-DSLR-Camera-Light-Video-Camcorder-Light-/280851318463?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item41640b06bf#ht_5460wt_1165

 

You need to make sure you get the mk2 version of either model with the magnetic filter holders and there is a brief review of them here: http://www.dvinfo.net/forum/photon-management/504810-312-asz-vs-z96-vs-600-led.html

 

Will be interested to see how you find it as I am about to order two of these as a small portable LED set-up as their colour balance and power look very acceptable.

I've just given up with LED lights as I just couldn't get them to look good with my camera.  I had a Z1 and bought some Cool Lights to go with it and that was fine but when I moved on to a Z7 and recently the FS100 the colour balance just never came together. 

 

I found that you couldn't white balance with them because the cameras would see the light as a temperature of nearer 3600K then 5600K but the picture would look blue and so I had to manually colour balance the camera.  Even when I did that the was a colour cast which i managed to reduce by making my own "warm cards', (which anybody can make if they have photoshop and a colour printer and a little time to experiment).  It required a light turquoise to get rid of the cast. Even then I found skin tones to be problematic and requiring further work in post to bring it together. 

 

I must stress that this was in situations where the LEDs were the only light source, but I became really unhappy with using a source of light which relied on other more complete light sources to pull the colours together.

I realise it's not in the same class, but 29 quid for a 160 LED video light is a bit of a bargain.

 

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Pro-CN-160-LED-Video-Light-Most-Cameras-DV-Camcorder-2-years-Warranty-/300671093233?pt=UK_Camera_Video_Lights&hash=item460164c9f1

Cheap LEDs may be a bargain, but as Medidox has said, they bring problems. Colour-rendering is poor if the LEDs themselves all look the same colour (white). This is because they're actually blue LEDs with a layer of yellow or amber phosphor which absorbs some of the blue light. Stokes' Law says that the phosphor cannot emit light at the same wavelength as the excitation energy, so there has to be a gap in the spectrum. It's this gap which brings the main problem, but the lack of far red and far blue doesn't help either.

 

I'm working on a new metric to assess this. I presented a paper on it at IBC last year, and now we have an EBU group on it. There will be another IBC paper this year, plus a submission to te CIE immediately afterwards. AMPAS (the Oscars people) and the SMPTE are interested in this work as well. We hope to have the standard launched by IBC. We have some more data to collect on cameras, and then we can fix all the parameters at one meeting in April.

The setting I was using against the sun today seemed to have both sets of LED's at full.

 

I'm preferring this mixing unit.

I have a fixed daylight LED camera light and I find the daylight doesn't match my fluorescents or MSRs, and using the supplied orangey filter or proper CTO doesn't match my Dedos.

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/PRO-144-leds-LED-Light-Kit-video-camcorder-camera-Bi-color-3200-5600K-dimmable-/270929032622?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item3f14a0f5ae

This is a smaller adjustable colour temp light and a bit cheaper than the first one, just an alternative for some maybe.

Duncan, you can see part of the problem in another thread, 'The problem with LEDs...'.

 

If there's sufficient demand, I can provide the technical explanation, and what we're doing about it.

Rob, that's the smaller version of the unit I bought.

£87 vs £120.

 

Personally, I'd rather spend a little more and get double the brightness, you can always turn it down!

But if you need something small and lightweight these are great.

 

Alan, I've seen you post, and while I agree wholeheartedly that there are shortcomings I don't film many non-caucasians - and that's an extreme example of CRI issues.

 

I'd be interested to see tests of a variable colour temperature unit against a fixed unit.

Have a look at the Coollights blog for an article explaining the methodology they've used on their variable temp LEDs: http://www.coollights.biz/wordpress/archives/199

Richard Andrewski from Coollights is a regular contributor on another well known forum and has been great when I've bought kit from him in the past.

 

Duncan.

Duncan, it isn't just the skin tones, look at the other colours as well.

 

 

Doing a lot of medical work I have found that all skin tones are problematic for me when using an LED light with a CMOS camera.  It may well be that your combination works better than mine did.  But I also had a Cool Lights rig, 2 x 600 floods and a 256 spot. 

 

I agree that Rchard  Andrewski is a good guy (I was one of the first in the UK to buy from him back in 2007 and have been pretty loyal since and we've communicated ideas pretty often over the past five years) but even he has had to admit that LEDs have deficiencies, which was first apparent when the extra filter kit came out for the lights.  I think that the variable colour temperature LEDs may be better, but I wont dip my toe into this part of the water again until I am happy with the output from my camera under that light comes together with other material without having to undertake a lot of post production in the edit suite.

You can now get the Bi-Colour LEDs delivered for less than £100 now: http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/121090013072

 

I have three of these and they work really well as fill lighting. And give reasonable results as key lighting.

I put two together on a short bar with diffusion gel fitted over the front, and use a single unit as a kicker with some black wrap as a snoot.

 

If I can, then I will take non LED lighting but I'm often travelling and have to carry the entire kit myself.

I take my FS100, 4 Lenses, Tripod, Rode Boom, 2 Dedo Stands, 3 LED, Batteries, Radio Mics and my DVTec MultiRig.

 

If you want examples of some work using them PM me.

 

Duncan.