Fiilex LED lights - many now unsupported

[Grant Peacock]

I have just had occasion to check in with Fiilex staff regarding my Fiilex lights. I spent thousands in 2018 on various LED heads and accessories. I have just learned that EVERY model of light I purchased is now in discontinued status (and unsupported for parts or servicing).

The 'deceased list' is avail here : https://fiilex.com/support/legacyproducts.php

These are high quality and capable lights, but as every owner-operator knows, that's all moot as soon as a unit fails or is damaged, and cannot be sent in for repairs.

I'm not new to this kind of issue (having been in charge of gear for 30 years now). But I do find it faintly amusing that the company staff will generally follow up with something along the lines of "But hey, you can order our new line of products here...."

Er, nope. I have learned my lesson, once again. I am prompted to mention Ross Lowell of Lowell Lighting Systems, Brooklyn - what a great guy (long retired) - his staff would take anything in, repair it, ship it back, and most likely not even bill you for the work. Low tech lights that had decades of service in them, and were used for many memorable shoots. Perhaps I shouldn't have given my kitsl away!

Happy New Year everyone,

Grant.

 

[NorBro]

5 years is pretty good...the formula for the new generation usually sees a discontinuation after a year or two as a result of the rapid rat race and competition.

These days, if you're buying a light over 200 bucks, you're either using house money or can afford for them to break.

 

[Grant Peacock]

Thanks NorBro. Another opportunity to reflect, perhaps, on how values have changed, along with everything on the gear side. I started out with high cost items that were also eminently serviceable. But that's a story from another time....

 

[Run&Gun]

Grant, my first light kit was a Lowell. Can’t remember the name of it, but it was two Omni’s, a Tota and stands and accessories in a hard case. The lights were stolen a long time ago, but I still have the hard case and the PB backpack style case that I ended up carrying them in, I sorta miss those days. Dead-simple and inexpensive. They were basically metal boxes with a couple of wires and a reflector that you put a lamp it. And pretty much anyone could fix them themselves if something happened. Now today our “lights” are computers and if something happens, it’s going to cost a large percentage of the initial cost of the light to repair it or it’s going to have to just be tossed in the trash. Used to be, lights were a safe, long-term purchase, that would last decades, if not sometimes someone’s whole career. What are the chances that my LP’s or Astera’s or Aputure’s are still alive and kicking in 20 years? 15? 10?

 

[chris_f]

That’s a real shame and surprising that not even spare parts will be made available for a product sold in 2018 - ouch!

Not all LED manufacturers have such short product cycles though - I mean how long has the Arri Skypanel been out for now? Around 7+ years I believe.

 

[morgan_moore]

5 years is pretty good.

I think not.

---------

For lighting this has been a funny decade?

We mainly have no desire to buy arri LED which has been 5X the cost of the rivals. Maybe arri have legacy support and that was part of that 5X cost.

There were a bunch of startups who made the simple calculation.. COB+box+psu=profit

Many of those startups will die.

Leaving litepanes for US and Apture for China.

I think Litepanels pretend to be american and are not. The chance of high price and poor service is high.

Apture probably are the new new (being viable and having killed photon bread and other older brands) . Its clear they have some serious people behind them. A plastic bolt broke on my amaran an thy were emailsing me and whatsapping to get spare out.

With apture I think low price good service. (is it a state backed enterprise giving the mission of bancruptin the western competition at any cost - just like smallrig who do amazing underpriced engineering - both subsidised??)

I went with lupo because the importer was local and I knew I could embarrass (social media) him into free replacements. Now im in the 5 year bracket that wil have gone.

Again with apture service wont be fast which is why I like 2 600s not one 1200.. it spreads the eggs between baskets.

Clearly while these lights are cheap we need to rent them high so they pay off fast???

 

[NorBro]

You're too much of a poet for me to ever understand what you're saying, but 5 years is incredible for these times...most lights are discontinued or ignored way before then since new products are released every 6 months (at least by companies with many different models who aren't focusing all of their energy into 1 or 2 flagships while they build their brand).

Ideally we'd pay low and have support forever but just doesn't work like that.

 

[paulears]

It's not that they are time limiting the products, but LED technology is moving at such a pace - 5 years is the equivalent of maybe 15 years for something that had a modern lamp in it. I have a couple of favourite tungsten Fresnels from the 60s/70s and they've managed a huge time because nothing changed. I buy lots of Chinese lighting - mainly for events and shows and 6 months is too long to leave it to buy another. I go to my favourite dealer and they have the same product, but buy it at your peril. It will be brighter, it will probably have a redesigned LED board to use the latest LEDs that are different to the old, and they might have split power supplies so failures of drivers only kill half of the red LEDs or whatever. On the colour front - white will look different despite the stated colour temperature and as fo red, green and blue - sending three DMX values, say 200, 150 and 98 for a particular shade will produce totally different results. I spoke to my accountant about life span and we're writing them off over 3 years now. A 2017 macbook costs more for apple to repair than they fetch in A1 condition - we just need to accept this. Arri, when they brought out their first LED Fresnel had a replaceable LED module, which I thought strange at the time - but clearly they understood LED was oing to be very different from what we had before.

 

[Run&Gun]

I think Litepanels pretend to be american and are not. The chance of high price and poor service is high.

The problem with Litepanels service, is the fact that I have to get my Litepanels serviced. The “failure” rate for their lights, for me, has been extremely high. And all but one of the issues has been power supply related. I don’t know if they are just overdriving/overworking them or they’re just buying and using s*** PSU’s. The lone outlier was a rotary encoder that went south. And it’s a damn shame, because I love the quality of the light. To me, it’s better quality light than Arri at like half the price. But my new workhorse has become the Prolycht 675. I’m using it every chance I get.

 

[morgan_moore]

When i said five years is not good i meant that for my business i guess stuff needs to stay relevant for longer to keep me in profit.

Coming from photo and film (wet stuff - the cameras lasted for ever - in fact still work) im not wanting to be in a kit arms race

 

[Run&Gun]

You're too much of a poet for me to ever understand what you're saying, but 5 years is incredible for these times...most lights are discontinued or ignored way before then since new products are released every 6 months (at least by companies with many different models who aren't focusing all of their energy into 1 or 2 flagships while they build their brand).

Ideally we'd pay low and have support forever but just doesn't work like that.

What I’m seeing now, from the some of these “budget brands”, they are releasing multiple model lights at the same time that are the same chassis with slightly different power levels/output(like 10% difference in some cases) and pricing them like $50-$100 apart. I think they just want to “increase their portfolio” of products, because from the point of view of a working professional, it makes no sense to build lights that are so similarly spec’d and priced.

 

[NorBro]

That's word-for-word the exact business model for almost all mirrorless cameras.

Multiple products with slightly different specs in the same bodies or very similar ones.

Companies trained our brains after many years to be excited about that 10% difference, but that's mostly gone now because of the new generation, times we're in...meaning any new camera better be really darn good if it's more than $2K.

Much better than the one the person is holding in their hands while reading the announcements.

 

[CharlesPapert]

Grant, my first light kit was a Lowell. Can’t remember the name of it, but it was two Omni’s, a Tota and stands and accessories in a hard case. The lights were stolen a long time ago, but I still have the hard case and the PB backpack style case that I ended up carrying them in, I sorta miss those days. Dead-simple and inexpensive. They were basically metal boxes with a couple of wires and a reflector that you put a lamp it. And pretty much anyone could fix them themselves if something happened.

I had a good long run with those lights too, below is a still from one of my first paid gigs, lighting an industrial video in '84. Couple of Omnis or DP lights plus that funky Softlite (those disappeared looong ago).They were indeed pretty simple and bulletproof, although the Omni was a flawed design in that if you hung the fixture with the bulb oriented a certain way, it would melt the base. But the Totas and DP's were pretty classic designs.

I operated a feature for legendary DP Tak Fujimoto around 2007 and was pretty stunned with his use of the original Lowel-lights i (I can't seem to find a picture of them, but they were simple standard E26 screw base sockets mounted to a flat plate that could be taped to surfaces as well as having a clever cutout so they could be mounted onto a light stand as well, fixed with an attached chain). I had never seen one in use on a professional set but on one of the first days in a restaurant location, his gaffer had them taped to the ceiling fixed with flood bulbs acting as key lights for this scene (https://youtu.be/8_2tkIqD3Io). It was a simple solution and it worked! Some years later I'd steal that for one of the Key & Peele sketches, although the paint in use on that location caused the tape to slowly unstick itself over time, so it wasn't quite as successful as I'd like from a practical level. Now of course we have LED fixtures that are light enough to tape to the ceiling but that is quite a recent development.

 

[paulears]

I'm intrigued by 'having them serviced'? There's nothing inside to actually service, bar cleaning out the dust - and that you could do yourself for free!

 

[Doug Jensen]

I operated a feature for legendary DP Tak Fujimoto around 2007 and was pretty stunned with his use of the original Lowel-lights

Even today, nothing looks better on a human face than a good old-fashioned tungsten light. Of course the obvious advantages of LED (cooler, dimmable, battery ppwered, daylight balanced, etc.) make tungsten undesirable now, but nevertheless, nothing looks better than tungsten on humans.

 

[morgan_moore]

Dont tell anyone about the arri 300 i recently bought.
tung certainly win on a portrait

but its pretty useless to fight the sum in an office with big windows and no wall outlets!

https://www.instagram.com/p/CYeslfJKW2c/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=

 

[Doug Jensen]

Dont tell anyone about the arri 300 i recently bought.
]

Okay. I won't tell if you agree not to tell that I still own two Lowel Fren-L 650 Tungsten Fresnel Lights.
Great lights, and far superior to the Arri 650's they competed with back in the day.
https://www.adorama.com/llfr1101.html

 

[Run&Gun]

I had a good long run with those lights too, below is a still from one of my first paid gigs, lighting an industrial video in '84. Couple of Omnis or DP lights plus that funky Softlite (those disappeared looong ago).They were indeed pretty simple and bulletproof, although the Omni was a flawed design in that if you hung the fixture with the bulb oriented a certain way, it would melt the base. But the Totas and DP's were pretty classic designs.

I operated a feature for legendary DP Tak Fujimoto around 2007 and was pretty stunned with his use of the original Lowel-lights i (I can't seem to find a picture of them, but they were simple standard E26 screw base sockets mounted to a flat plate that could be taped to surfaces as well as having a clever cutout so they could be mounted onto a light stand as well, fixed with an attached chain). I had never seen one in use on a professional set but on one of the first days in a restaurant location, his gaffer had them taped to the ceiling fixed with flood bulbs acting as key lights for this scene (https://youtu.be/8_2tkIqD3Io). It was a simple solution and it worked! Some years later I'd steal that for one of the Key & Peele sketches, although the paint in use on that location caused the tape to slowly unstick itself over time, so it wasn't quite as successful as I'd like from a practical level. Now of course we have LED fixtures that are light enough to tape to the ceiling but that is quite a recent development.

The thing that bugged me about the Omni’s, if you put a Chimera on them, often times they would tilt down/sag, because the light stand attachment point wasn’t strong enough/tight enough, even when you tightened it/torqued it down.

I remember those plates, but I never owned any.

 

[paulears]

Touring Dance companies hate LED for a totally different reason. The lay down rolls of dance floor in strips and have always just turned on every tungsten light, especially PAR cans and after half an hour, all the kinks are out and they lay flat. Not with LED they don't!

 

[DustinSchmidt]

I had a good long run with those lights too, below is a still from one of my first paid gigs, lighting an industrial video in '84. Couple of Omnis or DP lights plus that funky Softlite (those disappeared looong ago).They were indeed pretty simple and bulletproof, although the Omni was a flawed design in that if you hung the fixture with the bulb oriented a certain way, it would melt the base. But the Totas and DP's were pretty classic designs.

I operated a feature for legendary DP Tak Fujimoto around 2007 and was pretty stunned with his use of the original Lowel-lights i (I can't seem to find a picture of them, but they were simple standard E26 screw base sockets mounted to a flat plate that could be taped to surfaces as well as having a clever cutout so they could be mounted onto a light stand as well, fixed with an attached chain). I had never seen one in use on a professional set but on one of the first days in a restaurant location, his gaffer had them taped to the ceiling fixed with flood bulbs acting as key lights for this scene (https://youtu.be/8_2tkIqD3Io). It was a simple solution and it worked! Some years later I'd steal that for one of the Key & Peele sketches, although the paint in use on that location caused the tape to slowly unstick itself over time, so it wasn't quite as successful as I'd like from a practical level. Now of course we have LED fixtures that are light enough to tape to the ceiling but that is quite a recent development.

I trekked along with a lowel kit that I was using as recently as 2015/2016. A couple of omnis, a couple of tota lights, if I was lucky I'd rent the kit that included the rifa with the softbox. So those lights were still making work that clients were paying for not so very long ago. This work was all very small corporate stuff, so you could basically use whatever you wanted since the client didn't have a clue. But the point is that this basic kit that was being used in the 80's!!! (and I think invented in the 50's??) still got the job done.

That being said, I'd never want to go back to any tungsten lights for any of the work I do (small to no crew, fast paced). Now I have bi-color, full color, built in lumen radio, app-based adjustment from a phone, and on and on and on.

While it's unfortunate that things move so fast these days in terms of new technology overtaking old investments, it's an amazing time to be in production. I'll still take the faster product cycles over no innovation.