Kino Flow Kit, Cool Lights Kit, the differnce?

B

bentramer81

Well-known member
http://www.filmtools.com/diva400.html

I was looking at this kit compared to these items from Cool Lights:

2 total 2x55 watt dimmable portable with egg crate & adapter 5600k lights

2 total light stands

1 Flo Carrying Case

Can someone point out the major differnces? Because it appears that I am getting the same product but the cool lights are coming out $1,500 less, and that doesn't include the Kino Flo shipping cost. A couple things to keep in mind.... or one thing... I'm poor.
 
Richard, the cool lights owner should probably answer this because he has been on here a lot (which is cool). Although there is something to be said about having true kino's if your a professional, the cool lights are a better buy. More value for your money. Kino's are better.... but not $1500 better. What you could get (or save) with that extra $1500 from cool lights is of more value.

Differences are minor, mainly in light output, color rendering (and thats the bulbs), and build quality. You can find all that info if you google search "cool lights" and "dvxuser."
 
A few random thoughts about the differences in price and other things.

Did you make sure their kit contained bulbs? They often don't and I never understood why a kit doesn't. Ours does.

Size. We're small and lean. We hire contractors where we need help and I wear a lot of hats. So does my wife. I keep telling my 2 year old son he needs to get the hell out there and get to work but he just kind of looks at me like he doesn't get it.

Professionals and what they like. True pros don't need a "brand name" to make them a pro. People with confidence walk onto a set with what they're comfortable with, what they know and what they are sure will work well for them and not cause trouble. Many don't know us yet as we're new. I'm building what I'd be comfortable walking onto a set with and quite a few agree with me. Over time, more will agree with me. And when we miss some aspect of it, we simply revise it or fix it like any normal manufacturer would. They all make revisions with each generation of production and with those revisions comes what's known as "maturity". Much of what's known as build quality is just polish from experience. If you believe that the brand names were there with polish and overall build quality on day one then you simply weren't there to see whatever issues they had. Or you've been lucky.

Out of several thousand (different types of) C.L. fixtures out there now, we have some at Sony Pictures Studios, several TV stations and countless other small studios around the world to name some and we're about halfway into the 3rd year without any sales force at all other than me, our Internet marketing and referrals from happy customers. We even have an LED fixture on its way right now for use on "The Bounty" which is a new film with Jennifer Aniston being shot in NY. Who knows what else going on with my stuff out there I don't even know about. Its just a matter of time. Nothing happens overnight.

Flo CRI. There is a whopping 5 to 7 points difference in their tubes vs. ours as far as color rendering index based on what generation of tubes you have old or newer. Some think thats huge, but I don't. Close that gap and we lose a lot of lumen output so I think its not worth it. Despite that, we have over six thousand tubes of both 3200K and (mostly) 5600K out there now, not counting our 200w 8U bulb which is in the hundreds. Besides one guy here recently who was concerned about a softer look from a larger tube, not a lot of complaints about those 55w tubes. We feel confident we made the right decisions there about the "recipe".

Flo Color temperature. We have constant batch testing just like any other manufacturer does and we watch to make sure it stays in the 3200K and 5600K slots like it should. We've shown in my blog how that's done and its a normal part of any fluorescent (or CDM for that matter) manufacturing process.

Choice. We're not a "one category product" company like some. Dealers can carry just about any type of product but manufacturers often specialize. We've been able to develop a heck of a lot in many categories in less than three years considering our size. Most of these products with the exception of the tungsten fresnels you won't find anywhere else because we're not a dealer, we are a manufacturer executing our own designs through contract factories. Some competitors do just fluorescent, some do just HMI, some do just LED, etc. We have and are on the way to covering all the major choices and at prices others can't touch. Fluorescent, HMI and its economical cousin CDM, and now of course our first LED which was wildly popular out of the gate. Hard to find a pro lighting manufacturer doing all that. Arri's the only one I can think of that has all that but like other's their LED and HMI offerings are in the stratosphere and only affordable in renting for most. Ours come in so inexpensively you don't have to rent anymore and that was the idea.

Manufacturer Direct. This is a big one. I could sell out to the "dealer system". I get inquiries every week. We don't though because we believe in this distribution system as more efficient. If we ever did though, the price you pay today would become the dealer price and then a new higher "suggested retail" would be what every end customer would pay. That would close the gap quite a bit between their price and ours but not totally and we'd still be considered a good value at that point.

Hope that answers some of why its possible to have such a gap.
 
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Thanks for the answer Richard, can you tell me what the differnce in price for the LED's would be compared to the lighting mentioned above? The LED's wouldn't be as good for lighting a large space too, right?
 
Gels can be used on any lighting as long as its strong enough to punch through the gel. In general a gel works best on a hard light because the hard light (like a fresnel) has the throw and strength to make it through the filter and still project well onto the subject. Gels work with softlights but not as well as a hard light.

On LEDs. LEDs cost a bit more perhaps because they are newer tech and should last longer than other types of lighting. A CL-LED600 is a bit more in strength than a CL-255P but not quite as much as a CL-455P. We benchmarked it against an Arri 650w fresnel which is close in comparison.

Since an LED is mostly a point light source, but its too weak by itself to do much good, we put the LEDs in arrays and therefore what we get is a light that's kind of between a hard light and a soft light. It has good throw, better than a softlight like a flo, but the shadows are different than they would be with a true single point light source hard light. You can read more about that here:

http://www.coollights.biz/wordpress/archives/72

Color rendering of LEDs is not spectacular yet. This is because their light spectrum is incomplete. We make up for it with minus green filters until the LED itself can be engineered such that its not necessary. If you know the history of fluorescent you know that up to about 10 years ago most fluorescents needed minus green. Then they gradually started improving as consumers demanded better. Today you can still find the mediocre ones but its also easy to find good ones too. The LED will follow the same progression but I doubt it will take as long. A lot of the bi-color and RGB type LED panels will make up for this lack of spectrum and simulate a full spectrum light better in the meantime.

We have bigger units coming as well. Soon we'll be announcing one that's double the size of a LED 600 and another bigger one than that. No pricing yet on those. I have a bicolor panel too I designed with half high color temperature and half low color temperature LEDs and its much better in CRI than the single panels. With all LEDs lit of both color temperatures it comes out to daylight range. Its just a matter of selecting the LED upper and lower range so that when all are on, you get the color temperature you want for daylight which will be optimally in the range of 5600K to 6000K. Each set of LEDs has its own dimmer and you can fine tune further into lower or higher color temperatures by how the dimmer is set. We talked about this last year on this site when we were first designing the LED 600. Since then others have been doing that as well.

We have a smaller unit coming too. LED 256 spot which fits the bill for those that want an all LED kit and need a really small back / hair / rim light. The LED 600 spot is also good for that but a bit overkill. Its about half the size of the LED 600.
 
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I could sell out to the "dealer system"

Thanks to the internet and forums like DVXuser, the "dealer system" isn't quite as critical to building a successful business. And that's a good thing. I appreciate being able to buy directly from Richard. And can't wait to start on my first serious feature using my Coolights CDM's.
 
When many of the aforementioned companies started they had to do it the old fashioned way. So building a business and all the other progression that goes along with it was much slower and took decades. Here's to the internet... :beer:
 
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