Coollights LED

Okay, so now we're at $449 + S&H, but they aren't in? When are they expected to be back in stock? I don't have immediate need (as in this week), but I'm in preprod on some stuff that this might be perfect for. It seems i could simply wire up a deep cycle 12v marine to a 4 pin xlr and run for hours on end, right?
 
They'll (hopefully) be in August but can be gotten quicker than that with direct shipping from China to anyone that really needs it quicker. They should start rolling off the line as early as next week.

As for powering options, they can run off anything from 10V to 24V DC through the standard 4 pin XLR input we have, pin 1 ground / pin 4 hot.

The very economical Bescor 18wh battery for instance (BES-018XLR) runs the panel for about 5 hours.
 
Richard, thanks for the answers.

Has anyone done a test with these LEDs for kicker, rim or fill in an outdoors situation? I could primarily use them when out in the wild (so as to not need a genny).

As an add-on, are they completely silent? no hum or fans?
 
No hum or fans. Completely silent.

I recently had a photographer do some shots for me for the website, but we haven't put them up yet. Here are a couple of shots showing what the LED 600 can do outside. The first one shows what the area and subject looked like with no fill.


LED600DaylightNoFillCm.jpg


The next one shows with one 5600K flood panel as fill.

LED600DaylightFillCm.jpg


1/4 minus green gel was used as well on the panel. This was just the flood panel, the spot would have been dramatically brighter. I probably don't have to explain how difficult this shot would have been if you were using a traditional 650w fresnel which puts out about the same amount of light. Or even an HMI for that matter. The power issue alone makes this difficult but with the battery operated LED 600, no problem. The photographer was using the Bescor battery solution mentioned earlier.

There's another customer that has been using two of the spot panels on an LEDHBAR to do something he calls "painting with light" which appears to be mainly shooting a photo at dusk and spotlighting an area with the two panels. Kind of interesting:

http://gallery.me.com/hrossstudio#101374


Probably some timed exposures there but the one in particular with the man standing by the tractor in a field couldn't have been too long considering its hard to get a human subject completely still for a super long exposure.
 
The f-stop or shutter speed is not the same.

The f-stop or shutter speed is not the same.

The f-stop or shutter speed is not the same in the second image, I can tell by the background been brighter.
 
jramos said:
The f-stop or shutter speed is not the same in the second image, I can tell by the background been brighter.
Click to expand...

Yep, good catch! That is the problem with all of the examples that are provided by the still photographers. They just change their f-stop and shutter combination to get the exposure they need. Great options for stills, but not so much for us motion guys... I'm still looking for a good motion example. There is a quick motion sample done by a guy on vimeo / youtube- but if you watch it you can see that the automatic exposure is on, and the exposure fluctuates as he approaches and leaves the camera ...

These look like great lights- and I'm really interested in the 1200 and 2500 versions- I'd just like to see some "real" samples of the light before buying ...

I have owned Richard's lights in the past. And he does a GREAT job at customer service, and I think his lights are a GREAT bang for the buck. I just want to know what I'm buying before I spend the cash on a light that may not get used. :)
 
jramos said:
The f-stop or shutter speed is not the same in the second image, I can tell by the background been brighter.
Click to expand...

Yes, that was a good catch. I've got two of the four bank portable flo's and just used them for an interview, and they worked out great.

A shot of the set up can be seen here:

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=2030462&l=65cd7953df&id=645759207

And the actual shot through the lens looks like this:

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=2030461&l=2cb4a4662b&id=645759207

Since then I've been really interested in getting the LED's and would really like to see that shot again with an apple to apple comparison. I'm really interested in the next incarnation of LED's as hinted by Richard.
 
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LOL. The skeptics arrived. Ryan, what's a "real sample" ?

By the way the background brighter can also be sun behind clouds or not behind clouds, behind building or not behind buildings, etc.

I asked the photographer about the setup and here's what he said:

"They were just natural light with a CoolLights LED added for fill. You can see what the narrow street shot looks like with the LED turned off (and all other settings the same) in the pic I included. There was no light to use a reflector with, and this happens often. The LED gives a reflector look without needing any sun beams to work with, and also does not blow around in the wind the way a reflector can."
 
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Cool Lights said:
LOL. The skeptics arrived. Ryan, what's a "real sample" by the way?
Click to expand...

All I'm looking for is a sample that shows the before and after of a lighting setup that just uses the LED's keeping the camera settings the same. For a person working in "cinema" that would mean using a 180 degree shutter filming at 24p. Additionally, knowing the F-Stop, the distance of the light, and any filtration would also be helpful. Having the readings from a light meter would be an additional bonus, but I'm more interested in the "real" world results. Doing this for both the spot & the flood will not only give a good feel and example of what each light can output, but it will show of the quality of the light.

Showing this kind of example should not be hard to do, nor that hard to come by. But having before and after stills using different settings, and having a video where the camera adjusts automatically does not tell me anything about the light output. It only shows me the qualities of the light. I know you have the spec's of the light output on your site, but having the specs, and seeing the spec in action are two different things.

I do not think that is an unreasonable request.
 
Ryan –

I don’t have any “test footage” as such, only real world jobs shot using the LED 600 light panels. Our last job entailed an assistant running around with me as I ran through a forest chasing people. He had two V-Lock battery operated LED600 panels on a connecting T-Bar Richard made up for us. I was using a Sony PDW-700.

I think we were the first studio in the UK to purchase these panels and we have used them in quite a variety of jobs and they are still performing well.

For industrial work as fill –in lighting, no filtration is generally required; however we do need to use diffusers on certain subjects. For subjects where colour correction particularly for skin we use various CC filters and diffusers.

In one recent job that had various scenes to be shot we took a range of lighting with us, Arri 2K, 1K, 650s, Redheads and the Coollights – we used them all – the Coollights with their ability to use V-Lock batteries is one of the strongest selling points for our type of company where often we shoot - where a power supply is not forth coming, the need to act quickly, difficult lighting situations and of course travelling.

Here is a link to a review we did with a number of LED manufactures – it may or may not be helpful to you.

http://www.studioscotland.com/litepan_review.htm

As a user of many types of lights, if I can help with any questions on the LED600...

Regards: Stu
www.studioscotland.com
 
Brilliant Stu- thanks! Now while it may not be exactly what I was asking for, it does show me how the lights work in reality. It shows the setup, and the results- great write up- very useful. I greatly appreciate it. :)

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Now was that really so hard? That kind of write up is much more useful then examples from still photographers. (Unless your main market is towards stills, in which case I have missed the point.)
 
Thanks Richard for making this product. I'm just getting into video after many years as a still photographer. It appears that I'm getting into this field at just the right time. These battery powered lights combined with the astounding low light capability of the Canon 5DII are going to make things a breeze I think.

How's August availability looking? ...or are they already sold out?
 
Jeez Richard, couldn't you or the person that shot this sample find an attractive model?

Man, is that a beautiful shot or what? I was just mesmerized by the way the light wrapped around her face and went into a soft shadow on her cheek. It would be hard to make her look bad in any light but that was just extra stunning!
 
Thanks for the comments guys. There should be plenty of stock around end of August.

The real thanks for the video/stills goes to Robert Ruffo of Canada. Also thanks to him for picking the model too. When you commission something like this and aren't involved at every step of the way, sometimes you don't know what you'll get at the end.

In this case though, I was very happy with not only the choice of model and shooting venues and examples but also the final results which are indeed super. I'm expecting more stuff from him but he's traveling now on a shoot somewhere. One other comment he made was he appreciated particularly how he could plug everything he used into one surge protector and not even tax it, plus the battery operation of the LED too out on the street was indispensible.
 
If you click into the individual light pages you'll see he has "This product will be in stock on Wednesday 30 September, 2009"
 
We're just running late. Undermanned right now so its taking longer than we expected. We have however been shipping direct from China to people that wanted the LED 600 right now as we do have quite a bit of product finished, tested and ready to go. We're just not finished with the total production of all products so we can't ship to US stock yet.

If you want one now, just send an email to info@coollights.biz stating city, country, post code, how many units and what accessories and we'll put together a quote.

We don't sell batteries, just the adaptation. V or AB type for the LED 600 and smaller camcorder battery type adapters for the LED 256 (Sony, Panasonic, Canon and JVC).
 
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