Category: Litepanels

The respected lighting & accessories company F&V just updated their LED panel line-up. Additionally to their good quality affordable large and compact LED’s they’ve added ultra-high CRI (color rendition) panels to the mix. Nice!

F&V - high cri LEDWe’ve been following the development of F&V lights very closely over the past years and this has several reasons:
- Even their affordable LED lights had very good CRI values (85). The 3 light kit for example
- Their lights have very strong light outputs.
- Their lights are very affordable. The 3-light kit for example goes for $1000 (LINK)
- The lights might not look supercool, but their built quality is solid and lightweight.

With a single panel costing $400 we were very curious to see their newest generation of panels which have a CRI value of 95. Panels with lower CRI values (most LED’s nowardays have below 80) cannot reproduce all the colors on your camera accurately thus resulting in weridly tinted skin tones or colors. Especially when working in combination with other light sources like the sun (CRI: 100) adding a low CRI LED in the mix can be problematic.

For people who want the light quality they’ve gotten used to before LED got big these new lights offer a great lighting quality. The soft distanced milky layer in front of the LED’s will make your light even and soft, avoid multi-shadows and blinding of your talents.

The high CRI panels will come at a price though: With their included DMX module they will cost around $1900.

The good news is that some of their other, smaller panels will also be updated and not see a price increase:
Z180 – $369
Z96 – $169

The new panels should become available in their stores within the next months:
US F&V Store: LINK
European F&V Store: LINK

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All credit is given to author cinema5DSebastian Wöber

The respected lighting & accessories company F&V just updated their LED panel line-up. Additionally to their good quality affordable large and compact LED’s they’ve added ultra-high CRI (color rendition) panels to the mix. Nice!

F&V - high cri LEDWe’ve been following the development of F&V lights very closely over the past years and this has several reasons:
- Even their affordable LED lights had very good CRI values (85). The 3 light kit for example
- Their lights have very strong light outputs.
- Their lights are very affordable. The 3-light kit for example goes for $1000 (LINK)
- The lights might not look supercool, but their built quality is solid and lightweight.

With a single panel costing $400 we were very curious to see their newest generation of panels which have a CRI value of 95. Panels with lower CRI values (most LED’s nowardays have below 80) cannot reproduce all the colors on your camera accurately thus resulting in weridly tinted skin tones or colors. Especially when working in combination with other light sources like the sun (CRI: 100) adding a low CRI LED in the mix can be problematic.

For people who want the light quality they’ve gotten used to before LED got big these new lights offer a great lighting quality. The soft distanced milky layer in front of the LED’s will make your light even and soft, avoid multi-shadows and blinding of your talents.

The high CRI panels will come at a price though: With their included DMX module they will cost around $1900.

The good news is that some of their other, smaller panels will also be updated and not see a price increase:
Z180 – $369
Z96 – $169

The new panels should become available in their stores within the next months:
US F&V Store: LINK
European F&V Store: LINK

11812311-1_lg

11812305-1_lg

All credit is given to author cinema5DSebastian Wöber

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So what are these Litepanels Sola lights you wonder? Me too, so I had Ali from Litepanels explain that to us at IBC.

This looks like a nice light kit considering that according to the manufacturer these daylight lamps offer an output comparable to a 100W HMI.

The Sola lamps are 30W LED lights in a fresnel-like single light enclosure, much like the Arri L7-C we saw yesterday (LINK).

The Sola ENG kit has the following in it:
- Sola ENG x3
- Gel Kit (Set of 3) x3
- Ball Head Shoe Mounts x3
- Shoe Mount Conversion Kits x3
- Barndoors x3, AC/DC Power Supply x3
- AC/DC Power Cord x3, TVMP Mount x3
- D-Tap Cables x3, Nano Stands x3
- Pelican 1510 Case with Custom Foam
- Lastolite Fold up Soft Box, Diffuser

The Sola ENG kit is currently $2695:

All credit is given to author cinema5D newsSebastian

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Here are two very nice products by a company that makes great stuff for the low budget. F&V manufacturers some great led lights and they are among the few companies that I know actually manufacture their stuff themselves and they have their own US and EU store.

The new ringlight they offer not only has a lot of light output it also incorporates their new milky filter which transforms your multisource led light into a single sourced light. I love that. Some companies are starting to offer these kinds of filters with their LED’s.
The ringlight is 169€ and that’s a bargain.

The other lights O’Conner showed us were their LED panels which they also upgraded with the milky filter. They will shortly offer a 3 panel kit including stands and a bag for 1000€. Nice, unfortunately he didn’t mention that in the video, but I know.

One thing to mention, their lights are cool in terms of ergonomics, build-quality and light output, but their CRI value, so the light temperature is not grade A. While this is not perfect when you’re using multiple different lightsources, I find it very acceptable for the price.

Check out their websites for the details.

US F&V Store: LINK
European F&V Store: LINK

All credit is given to author cinema5D newsSebastian

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Here’s another new LED light from a company that has some great products and evolves every year. I have tested these and appreciate the quality vs price ratio here. It’s just right. I reported about their medium sized Z180 LED two weeks ago. Here are their small combinable on camera lights.

They just received their first batch of these lights in the European store (see below):

American F&V store:
K160 – $39
K320 – $59
K480 – $89

European F&V store: LINK

All credit is given to author cinema5D newsSebastian

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*This promotion will end after all our NAB 2012 videos have been posted. Multiple tweets of the same article and retweets will not count.

For your information: I recorded more videos at NAB than the ones you’re seeing on this news blog and I’m filtering the products I find useful and helpful. I test the products at the show so you will only find NAB videos of companies I find worthy to be supported here. That being said, here’s a product that really stood out. Let me tell you why:

The Zacuto Z-Light Plasmalight looks like it could be a true alternative to LED. Do we need an alternative to LED? Yes. While LED offers numerous advantages over conventional light fixtures and professional LED’s color rendition has reached an acceptable level there are still some issues that remain:
- LED is expensive
- LED isn’t perfectly soft
- barndoors will cast multishadows
- and LED usually hurts the actors eyes

It’s nice to see a technology that solves these problems and I hope the Z-light will really be “$500 cheaper than everything else”.

There’s another new soft light technology that was presented at NAB 2012:

PRG TruColor HS Remote Phosphor Lighting that is basically an LED panel that triggers a chemical reaction of some sort in an overlaying panel that can be interchanged for another color blend and outputs a whopping 4000 watt tungsten equivalent of light. That’s nice, but it’s also expensive at $3500. See a video about this technology by our friends from freshDV and nextwaveDV below.

Let’s hope these lights evolve quickly to give us the advantages of these fixtures at a price we can afford.

All credit is given to author cinema5D newsSebastian