Need help! LED Spot Suggestions?

[Danny Winn]

So I'm looking for a good but affordable LED Spot capable of delivering a nice harsh rim light, would need to be able to attach barn doors as well. Needs to be 5200-5500 k (No tungsten).

I'm hoping to find something new in the $300 range if possible (Definitely can't afford Arri's)

Can any body point me in the right direction? Thanks much!

PS: Most of the stuff I've found online has been DJ equipment without stand capabilities

[James Kuhn]

Danny Winn...I personally own a LitePanels 3" SOLA ENG Fresnel LED. It comes with Barn Doors and a small filter pack. I like the quality of light it puts out, however, it's cost is outside of your budget.

You also might be able to find one used?

I hope this helps.

Best regards,

J.

[Derek Heeps]

Would daylight balanced fluorescents ( like the Calumet Quattros or Bowens Tri-Lites ) be any good ?

I think they run at £150 ish , excluding stands , and are cool running .

[Danny Winn]

Originally Posted by James Kuhn

Danny Winn...I personally own a LitePanels 3" SOLA ENG Fresnel LED. It comes with Barn Doors and a small filter pack. I like the quality of light it puts out, however, it's cost is outside of your budget.

You also might be able to find one used?

I hope this helps.

Best regards,

J.

Yeah, those are a little out of my budget James, I did find this one (Below) for just $299.00 but cant really find any videos or reviews on it. Are you familiar with it at all? It says it has a built in diffuser so I'm not real happy about that because I'm looking for a harsh rim. LINK: LED 100WA-56 Daylight Dimmable Studio Light - Free Shipping to USA

[Danny Winn]

Originally Posted by James Kuhn

Danny Winn...I personally own a LitePanels 3" SOLA ENG Fresnel LED. It comes with Barn Doors and a small filter pack. I like the quality of light it puts out, however, it's cost is outside of your budget.

You also might be able to find one used?

I hope this helps.

Best regards,

J.

Originally Posted by Derek Heeps

Would daylight balanced fluorescents ( like the Calumet Quattros or Bowens Tri-Lites ) be any good ?

I think they run at £150 ish , excluding stands , and are cool running .

Probably not Derek, those all look to be Flo lights which are really soft, I need a harsh LED or fresnal type. Not sure about this one for $299. http://www.led-video-lights.com/led-...sa_p854.htmlto USA

[Paul R Johnson]

Sadly your budget isn't realistic for anything other than a small on camera light. The one in your link looks a bit 'over specified' - and they even refer to it as a 1000W a couple of times. The physical size of it seems very small for a 100W LED light source, so I really don't know. The Chinese Arris are starting to be available with a 100W LED cluster and you get the barn doors and Fresnel lens - but they're still $500-600. If you want controlled lighting - you are going to have to bump the budget.

[Bill Davis]

Originally Posted by Danny Winn

So I'm looking for a good but affordable LED Spot capable of delivering a nice harsh rim light, would need to be able to attach barn doors as well.

Well, that's going to be a bit of a problem since traditional barn doors don't really work with LED arrays.

At best you'll get a bit of spill control, but nothing even close to what you'd get using a barn door on a traditional open face or fresnel unit.

Remember, each LED is it's OWN spotlight. Each LED has it's OWN beam spread. So when you shut a barn door on an LED array, all you're doing is masking rows of the LEDs. And the led on the far right with a 40 degree spread will happily shoot light at an angle right past the barn door on the left.

And if you try to close the barn doors too much, you'll get venetian blind type light stripes on your subject.

LEDs get a 10 for light per watt efficiency - and maybe a 3 for light control.

As you've noticed, the units that put LEDs inside a system that re-directs the light through a lens to get the control characteristics of a $200 small fresnel - typically cost 5 times what a simple tungsten fresnel would set you back.

Just how it works.

[Doug Jensen]

Litepanels has some really great LED Fresnels and I own several, but they aren't cheap. As I have told hundreds of people at my workshops, if you don't have the budget to do LED right, just stick with tungsten.

[Shaun Roemich]

Originally Posted by Danny Winn

PS: Most of the stuff I've found online has been DJ equipment without stand capabilities

The DJ stuff will cycle and drive you mad. Colour will "roll through" and give you terrible colour cast.

[Bob Richardson]

This light may be underpowered for your needs, and it comes with caveats...

Comer CM-LBPS1800 On-Camera LED Light (Sony Battery) | L.A. Color Pros

But...

If you look at the photo you'll see the bottom barn door isn't a barn door at all... its a lens with individual magnifiers for each LED. It's meant to alternate between a narrow beam and a wide beam.

The lens is spring loaded, meaning it pops all the way up into place when you swing it up.

I've found that with some fiddling and some luck, you can adjust the beam and get a nice simulated spotlight by holding the lens a fraction of an inch further away from the light than the default spring-loaded position. This can be accomplished with a stiff piece of foam or another lightweight material that's not slippery and doesn't compress very much.

It's sold as a camera-mount light, but you can turn just about any such light into a stand-mount light with something like this:

Amazon.com: Fotodiox Flash-Umb-Bkt-Ultra-Nis Ultra Heavy Duty Flash Umbrella Bracket with Swivel/Tilt Head, Mountable to Light Stand and Tripod - Fits Nissin Flash Di866, Di622, Di466 and PZ400: Camera & Photo

That bracket also allows for the use of umbrella-mount accessories.

The top swing-down lens is a diffuser which converts to tungsten-like. They sell a replacement for it which is a non-colored diffuser.

The only real "barn doors" are on the left and right side of this, and are of limited utility for the reasons others have mentioned about LED array fixtures previously.

You can run it on a Sony-compatible camera battery.

[Danny Winn]

Thanks for all the responses everybody! It is clear that I need to up my budget for what I really need, I will save my money and try to get one of the Litepanel fresnels. I will really appreciate it when I finally get it. Thanks all!

[James Kuhn]

Danny Winn...I think you've made the wise decision. I've always found, when I buy 'cheap', I always buy twice.

Best regards,

J.

[Mark Kenfield]

Originally Posted by Danny Winn

Thanks for all the responses everybody! It is clear that I need to up my budget for what I really need, I will save my money and try to get one of the Litepanel fresnels. I will really appreciate it when I finally get it. Thanks all!

Danny, I'd suggest you look into the Mole Richardson LED fresnels as well, they seem to offer a significantly lower cost per lumen ratio than the Litepanels.

[Noah Yuan-Vogel]

It's not clear what your needs are. Are you looking for particular photometric performance? Beam angle?

Why not a budget LED like the Yongnuo YN600 daylight version or something? Similar performance to a 1x1 litepanel but for your budget you could get two of them.

[Danny Winn]

Originally Posted by Noah Yuan-Vogel

It's not clear what your needs are. Are you looking for particular photometric performance? Beam angle?

Why not a budget LED like the Yongnuo YN600 daylight version or something? Similar performance to a 1x1 litepanel but for your budget you could get two of them.

Hey Noah, as I said in my original post, I need a spot cabable of a nice harsh rim light, everyone has told me that the LED panels would probably not give the harsh light edge I would need at the distance I normally shoot in (Wide commercial shoots). I currently use a set of flo light soft boxes but I've always wanted a stronger backlight,

Thanks for responding;)