LED Light Comparison by Timur Civan

Interesting and informative. Thanks for posting / sharing. One quick question... wondering why you didn't test / try the Dracast 1000 Bi-Color units - so that you could dial in the 3200 tungsten instead of CTO gel on daylight... never mind... shouldn't post so late at night... I'm asking mod not the author. :Drogar-Shock(DBG):
 
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Timur said in the article that he prefers the daylight version of the Dracast because of the output. I myself own a couple of the Dracast bi-colors and use them on smaller shoots, but I feel they aren't properly designed for full-scale production (the bale block and tilt clamps are poorly designed).

I am surprised to see that the Celeb didn't register magenta, as it is a known quantity that they do so and we always use them with 1/8 or 1/4 plusgreen. Then again--I've heard that the C700 meter doesn't read the green-magenta axis very successfully for some reason.
 
I also own a couple of the bi-colors and agree with you about the tilt clamps - total pita... but also agree with Timur's conclusion... for the $ - they do produce good quality and decent output.
The eye opener for me was the warmness of the sky panel.
 
Timur is close friend so props for him for doing the work BUT... Quality of LEDs have as much to do with LEDs themselves as how the camera's sensor reacts to it. So this test is useful only for those filming with RED (dare to claim RED with Dragon sensor only?). In any give month i jump between Arri, RED, Canon, Sony... For instance just yesterday i used original LitePanel to bring a bit of contrast on actor's face. If i were shooting with RED (the one before Dragon - don't know much about Dragon and LEDs) his skin would be all green, but because it was Canon it looked all nice.

More accurate test (and much more painful to execute) would be to compare how each light works with each camera, though i suspect even then we would be a bit in the dark as once again we would find out that there is no one universal tool for all jobs. EVER.
 
Having bought quite a few LED lights, I have to say there is another problem: variability. I have had situations where I bought 3 examples of the same light and one of them had more green in it by a goodly amount. Another situation I've encountered is that I go back to a supplier to buy another light that I like, and it comes to me with different characteristics, I then find out they've changed one of their subcontractors and all of a sudden the light is not exactly as before (without indicating on the website that it's changed!). So I do appreciate that Timur has taken on this thankless task, but at this point I tend to take a light as it comes - when I'm using it, that's when I know what I have, all the specs on websites or reviews or tests on youtube and the like may or may not reflect what product you get. It's a bit of a gamble. With old tungsten lights there wasn't this problem, I don't know why - it's possible that the LED technology changes so fast, or that there are so many manufacturers who jump into bulb production and there is not enough control, so you can't get your hands around all the possible combinations of elements. With the old tungstens there was a limited number of EOMs who controlled more of the technology and manufacturing stacks, so there wasn't this wild west type of chaos back then.
 
Yeah I'm kinda surprised how spikey all the spectrometer graphs are even in the super expensive LEDs especially if you compare it to the graph for sunlight, seems like there is still a lot of room for metameric failure even in the latest most expensive LEDs unfortunately. Seems like it's been shown long ago that CRI/Ra is a pretty poor or at least very incomplete representation of color performance. Would be interesting to see an HMI, plasma, etc shown in comparison as alternatives in artificial lighting.
 
I agree with the variability of daylight gear based on the sensor. And everything I own that's "daylight", being Kino knockoffs, LED, a range of HID from 150-400, and HMI - renders differently.

My solution (not owning a color meter) has been to shoot raw stills tests with each fixture - gray card and a face - and open them in camera raw. You can quickly use the raw controls to see what combos of CTO/CTB and green/magenta it takes to get close by playing with the WB eyedropper and the tint and temp sliders. Gel based on that and shoot another still and see how close you get. Many of my fixtures have strips of tape with the gel combos needed to get them around 5200k. It just takes a few minutes to do and has worked well for me.

A variant of that is scouting, if you're going to rely on the light of your location to some extent, usually corporate office and industrial locations. I try to shoot some stills with a gray card and see what it takes to get the primary location color to daylight (or tungsten) and reverse those gel combos for my lights. Most modern offices use "daylight" flos, which are really about 3700k with a green spike. Find the right combo and you can gel your keys to match the location, and know during setup what it takes to get close. It's been a huge time saver for me and allows you to have some fill in larger spaces that will match your keys and featured (lit) areas of a shot. I've had clients wonder why I'm putting orange and green gels on my light, but when you look through the monitor, it's all very pretty and snappy.
 
I have a few of the Flex Lights (verson 1) and I love them. Great color, super easy to setup.

The ergonomics of the mount and cabling aren't perfect but for the price, they are some of my favorite lights avail right now.
 
Thanks Timur! That was a great article and study. Dracast has been on my radar since last fall when B&H ran some really good "deal of the day" on the smaller 500s.

By now I'm sure everyone's familiar with the TLCI charts/testing(?)

I'm baffled at the visibly green tinge in the daylight setting on the Astras... when the TLCI says 96 (at the lowest) for this light. How can you clearly see a color cast while the light is rated near the top of the TLCI chart?
 
Anyone tried the Photon Beard LED range? I got a pair of the redheads, fantastic bit of kit. Anyone in the UK (manufactured here) should take a look.
Highly rated lights at the higher end in terms of price, was a lot to layout for lighting but a good investment.
 
Interesting test but also a missed opportunity. It would have been better if they showed the individual render indices for all the samples. The C700 can calculate and display R1 to R15. And the Ra/CRI only averages R1 to R8 which are the easiest to handle decently. Differences between lights more readily come to light (oops) in the R9-R15 sample set.
 
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