This is the heavy, rugged and highly desirable (by me) Godox
SL150 ii. It's a COB LED light with features.
Daylight balanced.
Obviously much attention was paid to cooling. Note the vents on the all metal chassis.
The back panel is straightforward and has a special button (the white one)
that changes the power ranges to turn off the fan. It also comes with a very
simple remote control that only turns the output up and down.
Much attention was paid to heat management. The fan isn't very loud.
It's only noticeable in very quiet rooms. Note also the robust yoke style
stand connector and the umbrella connector on the bottom.
Nice.
I wrote a book about LED Lighting for Amherst Media. It was published in 2010. That was ten years ago. LED fixtures for photographers and filmmakers were pretty primitive at that time but I saw a lot of promise, even with what was on the market back then. I purchased a bunch of different LED panel lights and used them for lots and lots of projects, and I could make a good argument that LEDs were useful for nearly all studio still-life projects and for most videos.
At the infancy of the LED revolution for photographers LEDs were plagued with two major faults. First, unless you spent thousands and thousands of dollars on a single light (I didn't) you were going to get lights that had poor color rendering with spikes and deep holes across their color response. This would never have worked for people working in color with actual film but it was possible with digital cameras because you could do custom white balances to cover most of the sins of the lights. If you could measure where the biggest dips in color response occurred you could go a long way towards helping out your lights by finding/assembling filter packs that helped pump up the lost parts of the spectrum.
But that was time consuming. And expensive. And robbed you of many photons.
The other fault of most lights was the fact that their output (sheer level of lumens) was nothing to write home about. I had several big panels that each had over 1,000 individual LED bulbs set in rows up and down and across the panels. But even with several big lights I was hard pressed to get enough light on a subject to shoot, say, a portrait of an active person. If they sat stone still and I could use a tripod and drop the shutter speed way down I could manage but if the person I was photographing was animated and moving then all bets were off.
One measure of color accuracy is called CRI (color rendering index). My earliest lights measured between 81 and 85 CRI. All of my current lights are billed at CRI 95 or higher. There are other, more exacting measures but this is a good place to start.
Each successive generation of LEDs made for photographers and film makers has just gotten better and better. And more and more powerful.
Probably the biggest breakthrough was a technology called COB (chip on board) which moved LEDs from a collection of big, discrete lightbulbs spread out on a panel to a single, more concentrated light source that acted more like a focused light than a soft, panel light. These new LEDs generally have a light source that is flat and anywhere from an inch to an inch and a half across. All of a sudden we had lights that acted, in terms of size and beam spread, far more like our traditional, monolight, electronic flashes.
The Bowen's flash/modifier mount quickly became the "standard" of most makers of economical COB LED units and let all of us working stiffs use the reflectors and speed rings that we were already using on a wide range of flash equipment. Now we can make use of soft boxes and umbrellas in a way that large, flat panels didn't allow.
My first COB lights came from Fiilex. They were small and not the highest output but it was obvious that they had mastered, to a much greater extent, color accuracy.
I have owned many other COB LEDs since then, all with Bowen's mounts on the front end. I kept selling them off as newer, more accurate and more powerful lights came to market.
A year ago I bought three lights from Godox called SL60s. They were the same kind of design style as a monolight flash but all LED. They had 60 watts of power output which was supposed to be the equivalent of a typical tungsten light fixture with a 300 watt bulb. But reality rarely matches conjecture physics....
The SL60s are a great adjunct to four of the Aputure LightStorm LED panels I own and it's really nice to be able to use them quickly, along with modifiers like soft boxes or octabanks. I used all seven of my mix of LED lights (not counting small, battery powered, on camera-type versions) on my recent shoot at a technology lab and I came away from the shoot wishing I'd had one more higher powered COB LED to provide a giant fill or to use through a window to mimic sunlight.
I started researching what's out in the market right now and came across the Godox SL, FV, and VL series lights. The SL is a traditional COB that runs only off A/C power and provides a fan cooled light fixture with a Bowen's mount and nice controls. It also allows you to turn off the fan and run the light in a lower power mode for close-in video work were good audio is critical. The FV is also a non-battery light but it combines LED illumination and flash (it uses the LED as a flash source so it's not quite as powerful as a much smaller hot shoe flash). The VL series is the product line that goes toe-to-toe with the Aputure 120D and 300D lights (but at half the price). It uses a three piece power set up that also allows one to use professional video batteries instead of just A/C power. But the VL lights have the separate boxes and cables for the power supply and the control box which take up so much visual space...
There are different power levels available through the product lines.
Most of my use of LEDs is in studio or on locations that have ready access to power. I was most interested in getting the best mix of light power, price and usability. I went with a traditional SL150 ii. I thought long and hard about the more powerful lights but you gain, in most instances, a bit less than one extra stop of light while you pay for it in dollars and weight. I'd rather have two reasonably powerful lights than one big, monster light.
The new light arrived last week and works perfectly. It's more efficient than the generation of SL60 lights so it actually puts out more than double their output. The new, faceted reflector is also more efficient. The kit came with a longer-than-usual, and thicker, A/C cable as well as with a set of four way barn doors, complete with a grid spot attachment. Useful for many video lighting situations.
The power output is both prodigious and accurate. In a large light bank, used five feet from a subject, I'm getting a meter reading of something like ISO 250, f5.6, 1/80th of a second.
We'll be lighting a live broadcast show in the next month and several of these in good soft boxes will make great key lights. I'll supplement with the smaller SL60's in smaller boxes or used directly on backgrounds.
This light even has enough output to be used as a mild/weak fill light in full sun. But just barely.....
As I add more powerful LEDs to the inventory I find less and less use for flash. We'll see how it all pans out.
I'd love to have an even more powerful light in the toolbox but I doubt I'd get that much use out of the difference.
Fun with lights! KT
