First proper LED purchase, looking at aruod £300/$300 per light

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funkytwig

Active member
I have a set of 3 650w tungsten Lilliput open faced and a Arri 300 Fresnel and want to start getting some Led lighting. Mainly as some of the jobs I do I have to travel light (basically carry everything). For these jobs I tend to carry a cope of these lights but LEDs should enable me to both carry more lights and travel even lighter.

So I am looking at spending around £600 on a couple of lights to get me started. The CAME-TV 55W seem a good option, fairly bright, small/light and good CRI but want to investigate LED panels that are a similar price.

This is for shooting interviews/testimonials and often in locations that often have a fair amount of ambient (daylight). It seems to me that Bi-colour at this budget are probably not ideal. They tend to be about ½ as bright so I can always use gells to change temperature. If I do gel them I probable would use a 1/2 or 1/3 CTO, even gelled the lights would have more output than the bi-colour. When I use the Arri 300 I tend to use a hollywood frost, which is only 1/3 of a stop. Does this seem like the correct way to go?

The two light panels I am considering are:
Aputure Amaran (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Aputure-AL-528S-Amaran-Digital-Filming/dp/B00GO348ZK/?th=1, £160).

CAME-TV 576D (http://www.digibroadcast.com/lighti...t-576d-daylight-led-panels-3-piece-set-p20060, £300).

But am up for considering others. Key thing is they need to have good brightness and have a high CRI.

So any advice would be good. Ime thinking a CAME-TV 55W and one of the above LED panels. I think the Aputure Amaran 528S is the one to get as the S denotes spot and you get around twice the brightness in the middle. As I am lighting interviews I don’t need a wide beam.

Alternativly I could get a cople on https://www.amazon.co.uk/Neewer-Dimmable-Bi-color-Video-Lighting/dp/B073PV6M9K/ and a CAME-TV 55W (for same price as a single LED panel) but not usre about the brightness, alough I could have two (whitch is work for setup).

There is also the Neewer CN-576 but cvant find mutch out about it. They seem cheaper than theabove Neewer light and are not bi-colour.
 
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If you're dealing with a fair amount of ambient light, unless you're trying to scrimp cost, get the Amaran 672S instead for about $278. If you want something much more durable, brighter, but heavier then get the Amaran Tri8 (888) although over your budget at $488.
For fresnel consider the Aputure LS mini 20d ($260) or the Came-TV Boltzen 55W ($298) but each has draw backs. Mini 20d fan noise. Boltzen 55W has Bowens mount compatibility but weak yoke prevents it from being too useful. Mini 20d barn doors seem to cut better for light shaping as Boltzen cut is a bit soft.

If you really want light weight consider flex lights but generally not as bright (especially if you're fighting ambient light).
 
cseeman said:
If you're dealing with a fair amount of ambient light, unless you're trying to scrimp cost, get the Amaran 672S instead for about $278. If you want something much more durable, brighter, but heavier then get the Amaran Tri8 (888) although over your budget at $488.
For fresnel consider the Aputure LS mini 20d ($260) or the Came-TV Boltzen 55W ($298) but each has draw backs. Mini 20d fan noise. Boltzen 55W has Bowens mount compatibility but weak yoke prevents it from being too useful. Mini 20d barn doors seem to cut better for light shaping as Boltzen cut is a bit soft.
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Think the CAME-TV 55W is the one to go for. Ime gusing the Aputure LS mini looks nice but they are 30w. I would probably put a defuser to soften so the extra watage would be good.

What makes me laugh is people keep on refuring to the CAME-TV and Aputure LS mini as Frznel. They are not, not that is really matters.
 
Spartacus said:
I have a couple of the newer Amarans with a higher CRI (for what it's worth), great entry level light used by many here.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Aputure-3-...&qid=1510063659&sr=1-6&keywords=Aputure+HR672
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They look great. I also just started reading about the Dracast LED500 Bi-colour. What is neat about them is rather than having a knob for intensity and one for colour they have a intensity knob for eatch bank of bi-colour LEDs. This mean you can actualy turn them all on (other bi-colour LEDs only have a max output of 1/2 this).
 
While budget bi-color LEDs may not be as bright as single color temperature versions, the more expensive bi-color lamps often don’t have this limitation.
 
Bern Caughey said:
While budget bi-color LEDs may not be as bright as single color temperature versions, the more expensive bi-color lamps often don’t have this limitation.
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Indeed, the Dracast LED500 Bi-colour dont seem to have. Also It is really budget LED paels I am looking at,

On a related poing I am thinking I may be able to aford 3 lights so wondering what whould be good for a hairlight. Something fairly directional and hard and due to this
 
The Aputure Amaran 672 panels are nice. They're plastic and won't take lots of abuse, but if you're one of those folks who take great care of equipment they should last you a good while.

Aputure make a 3-head kit in a few diffferent flavors. I'd go with daylight, 2 spot and one flood. Use a spot for your key through a silk to soften it, the other spot for backlight/hair light, and the wide to bring up your background. It's a very functional 3-point setup. I have a 5-point kit that I keep for seated interviews that contains 2 spot and a flood. It also has two of the Aputure Amaran AL-H198 panels, which are handy little buggers for eye lights, accents, etc. They're battery-only (unless you get a battery plate power supply), but can run for a long time even on the smaller Sony FP batteries since they draw much less power.
 
I'd suggest you look at the Bolton 55w Bi-Colour combined with a couple of Travor 3060A's
You can buy it all from AliExpress where you'll pay less than £460 if you buy them on the 11th on November.

Spend another £75 and you can buy Sony NP battery adaptors for the 3060A.
Another £44 gives you Wi-fi on the Boltzen via a phone app.

I own a couple of 672c's and an LS1c. Also Dedo 150Ws - they've served me really well for years but I'm preferring my Boltzen/3060A combination.
The Trevor flex panels are much much brighter and inherently much softer, and the Boltzen is a fab little light which is quiet and doesn't take 15mins to cool down.

Both these fixtures keep a constant brightness as you adjust the colour temperature with the Boltzen pulling approx 55w and the 3060A pulling approx 60w.
 
I'll echo sentiments on the Aputure 672s.

Definitely feels brittle, but I'm sure it's fine if you take of it. Decent amount of quality light output, especially for the price. Very travel friendly. Runs on batteries for a while. The fact that it comes with 2 of those big batteries of the price makes it worth it alone.
 
I don't know if it'll ever happen again, but at some point B&H had a deal where an F&V 3 light kit that normally went for $3000 was on sale for $500. I missed it 'cause I had no idea. Maybe at some point it'll come around again.
 
Duncan Craig said:
I'd suggest you look at the Bolton 55w Bi-Colour combined with a couple of Travor 3060A's
You can buy it all from AliExpress where you'll pay less than £460 if you buy them on the 11th on November.
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Thanks for the reply, Travor 3060A look great but also look a little fiddely to asemble. Few questions. Does the mount do tilt? Can it run off bateries?

cople fo things that make mw think it may not be the corect choice for me. At 120 the angle seems very widce, I sould go for the Amaran 672S version whitch has a 25 beam angle, whitch is perfect for intervews. also the CRI seems to be 90, whitch seems a little low. One of the big reasons I am considering LEDs is the CRI is now geting decent on the budget models.
 
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I second the F&V units, although they're basically plastic made fixtures. They're quite good..
 
funkytwig said:
One of the big reasons I am considering LEDs is the CRI is now geting decent on the budget models.
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The Amaran HR-672 panels have a good high CRI. I've used them for a couple of years now and have had no issues getting decent color.

Of course, nothing can compare to tungsten for rendering flesh tones, but LEDs have come a long way.
 
What are you trying to do with these LEDs? What's your lighting style? Pretty much all LEDs are somewhat limited in their flexibility so it helps a lot to go into it knowing how to buy the best thing for your use. For example, it's not like Tungsten where you can get a bright light that can do everything for cheap. Do you plan on bouncing them? Diffusing them? Using them hard? LEDs excel at creating soft light but hard light is a bit more difficult. Frankly I think most LED lights take on the 1x1 flood design but with no good reason except that it's sort of a neutral design that isn't that good at anything. My personal opinion is rather than get one kind of light that doesn't do anything that well, get two kinds of lights that each do something well. That means get a big soft lens-less unit that is great for diffusing into a big soft source and get a narrow beam unit that is great for punching and throwing light into bounces or creating contrasty effects (hard sun, light beams, etc). If you're just doing interviews you may be better off just going for some big soft LEDs.

Also bi-color doesn't necessarily mean less light. I've somewhat sworn off of heavy 1x1 flood panels lately in favor of flexible lights I can put anywhere, and the RX-18TD/RX-29TDX and FL3030A lights I've been using actually draw the full 50W or 100W at every color temperature, making them twice as bright as most similarly specc'ed bi-color lights when you need daylight or tungsten.

Regarding your questions about the 3060A light, yes assembling the frame is not very fun but I mostly use the smaller 3030A lights which are almost as bright (higher light density) and just clip them places (clip a couple inside an umbrella softbox for example) and forgo the frame. They are not ideal for battery power, but I run them off a battery bank that can do 24v regulated output. They make an NP-F battery solution for them as well but I'm a bit skeptical of it given the need for 4 batteries simultaneously...
 
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I leave my 3060A's assembled all the time, mostly with Kino grids on. The only time I would take the frame off is to stick the panel to a car headliner or something like that.
I've run them off inverters with car jump start batteries.
Noah, can you describe your 24v setup?
 
The 24v 4x SonyNP adaptors that Trevor make are pretty good.
A few things to note:

The bag isn't quite tall enough to hold the largest NP970 batteries with the zip closed.
There's a loop on the bag so you could hang it from a light stand.
Each battery slot has it's own status green LED which lights up when the battery has a suitable voltage.
The whole unit cuts out when a battery voltage drops too low, and the corresponding LED for that slot goes off.
Each of mine came with 4x small NP batteries and two chargers even thought the listing says batteries are NOT included.

I expect a set of three NP970 type batteries would power a 3060 for at least two hours - I've not tested that yet though.

When I build my frames into a 60x60 I also add a simple velcro grid to the front if I need to control the light. The resulting output is much brighter than my LS1 in a 60x60 soft box. Also the flex panels are much softer as the LS1 doesn't light the whole front of the soft box diffuser. Another benefit is of course that the 60x60 flex panel is featherweight and only and inch or so thick. Personally I prefer the colour rendition of the Travors over my Aputure lights - CRI isn't everything.

If you are on the lookout for these lights or any of the Boltzens, as I've mentioned earlier there's good discounts on the 11th via AliExpress. £260 for a 55w Bi-Colour for example... And use the App to get even more discounts.
 
forbyfiev said:
I leave my 3060A's assembled all the time, mostly with Kino grids on. The only time I would take the frame off is to stick the panel to a car headliner or something like that.
I've run them off inverters with car jump start batteries.
Noah, can you describe your 24v setup?
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Yeah I have two options. One is

Qidian QD-188-ALT $45
8x Panasonic NCR18650B 3.7V 3400mah batteries $48

Those are the best 18650 Li-ion cells around with great energy density and can output regulated voltage from 0-24V to power pretty much any DC device you want plus works as a huge 100Wh capacity USB power bank. Great tool to have in your kit.

Other option is
90W 12-24V universal car+AC power supply (w/ DC barrel input) $20
DC barrel to D-tap cable $10

Just set it to output 24V and replace the 5.5x2.5mm DC to cigarette lighter plug with the DC barrel to D-tap cable and you can power your light on any D-tap cable. These do expect unregulated 12V (10-14V) SLA battery input, but in my experience it had no problem with an unregulated 14.8V (11-16.8V) D-tap, though the one I got made weird noises with AC power input and stopped taking AC power otherwise this would be a nice solution that could just replace the included AC adapters while adding easy battery power input.

Frankly NP-F solutions sketch me out a little since for it to be cost effective you have to use 3rd party NP-F's and you're basically paying for batteries that you don't know what cells are inside and are almost always over-rated in capacity... with a battery that takes 18650 cells directly you know exactly what you are getting and can even make sure the cells are balanced properly which helps keep their life. Plus in a pinch I can use th 18650's to power my gimbal :)
 
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I've got 33 NP batteries and I don't personally have any problems with them.
I try to change them when I can during a shoot so I'm always using the fullest batteries, but I don't stress about it.
There's a mixture of brands, but I'd choose DSTE if I could.
 
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