Purchasing my first LED light.

T

Tom.Florek

Member
Right now I'm looking at the apurture 120D as this thing seems to be a beast of a light for under $1,000. My main lighting kit so far has been Arri Tungsten Fresnels, and while they are great, they simply draw too much power and I can't use them in locations without a generator. So I'm used to harsh lights, softened with flags and such.

I don't know the LED game at all and I am wondering what my options are in the sub $1,000 range. I am looking for a "portable" light that is at least 1k equivalent & that can draw power from a battery such as the Aputure 120D, but except for the rave reviews about it's price point I'm haven't found too much about the quality of light (or other LED lights for that matter). So my main questions can boil down to:

1) How does the quality of light behave when comparing LED to Arri fixtures? ( In the past I've used a combination of 1 AND 2 stop diffusion flags simultaneously to soften my tungsten Arris, they are HARSH)
2) As far as picking a daylight/tungesten, are there any advantages to picking one over the other and then just using a gel to change the temperature?

I'll be mainly using scrims/flags/any other sort of diffusion I can find as far as light modifiers go.
 
Always go daylight. Full CTO is only 2/3 stop loss, Full CTB is 2stops. I would avoid gelling LEDs where possible though, crazy color shifts happen. Also day interiors and day exteriors are where you need more powerful lights and need them to be daylight, whereas losing output for a night int/ext is usually not such a big deal. I wouldn't expect the 120D to compete with a 1K openface, more like a 500W openface or 650W fresnel.

Quality of light depends on what you put in front of it. The broad bare beam is perfect for putting in a softbox or behind diffusion, should get soft and even very quickly. Actually if you want crazy soft put it in an umbrella softbox and point it away from the diffusion. People seem to like octobox aputure makes, though it's not likely to be as even or efficient as a real parabolic umbrella/softbox.
 
Maybe wait for Aputure's 300D. It was just announced, but they're trying to keep the price under $1000.

3 times the brightness of the 120D. 2K tungsten equivalent. It can run on batteries, but being 300 watts, two 150 wH batteries are going to last you only hour, so keep that in mind.

The Aputure lights will need diffusion/bouncing if that's the look you're after, they're not soft unmodified.

Daylight vs Tungsten is really up to you, depending on what other sources you're mixing these lights with.
 
I am looking at Dracast LED fresnels as a solution - reviews seem to indicate that there are no color casts and they seem like an affordable option for a 1k equivalent solution. However, I can't seem to find anything about powering them via battery like you can with Aputure. There is a battery kit that Dracast sells for over $2,000, but this would be more than the light (s) themselves. Is there any other way to power them?
 
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