I have purchased lighting from several sources, and also have made purchases from Amvona. Here is my take:

Amvona - very agressive pricing, high "shipping and handling". Depending on what you are buying the quality is or may be perfectly ok. Their stands use plastic for many parts. Overall ok - just know what you are buying and know their products are not built to commercial standards - and maybe you do not need that.

ImageWestTV - a little like Amvona but slightly higher overall quality. They sell Britek, which has some features I like.

Coollights - while some of the products lack the bells and whistles you may see elsewhere, I find the build quality to be superb. In fact recently someone was looking at a mixed lighting setup I had using some coollights and stands along with some Briteks on Amvona stands.... they commented that the non- coollight products looked like cheap knockoffs (specifically softbox and stand). The Coollight stands are all metal and nicely made.

My 2 cents FWIW. I'm a coollights fan.

I have to agree with the above post, the coollights flos are sweet!

5000k white LEDs are around 77CRI. Checkout this link at super bright leds-

http://www.superbrightleds.com/compE27.htm


They even have a Spectral Graph.

-John

Actually, you can find higher CRI from some sophisticated suppliers. That's the spectrum for the LEDs that particular supplier is selling. Others will have different specs. Its definitely not easy to find high quality / high lumen per watt LEDs though. Plus you can have small matching problems too within a batch.

Hehe, yeah and if you're in Sacramento, shipping is pretty much Overnight with "Ground" prices since we ship from Reno now.

That's not too bad I guess (average Delta_E of around 4) and they list some with CRI's over 80. What do users think about this?

Depends on the LEDs you get. The ones from Flolights are CRI 93. I haven't checked the color temperature yet to see if it really is 5600K, but I'll try to remember to do than on the next shoot.

Richard-

Can you use Chimera accessories with cetain LED lights? Its good to know you can get them in a higher CRI. The LED panels I used in the past looked nothing like electronic flash/HMI and lacked compatibility with Chimera parts.

-John

The 655 banks from Amvona have free ground shipping and handing.

My CFO (wife) just gave me a PO for the lights so I will be ordering them soon and will report on my findings.

fair enough. My purchases were on E-bay. I am not dissing Amvona... just stating my impressions.

All depends upon if they have a speedring that could fit around the fixture. I doubt it though. Most of the chimera stuff will be for tungsten/hmi type fixtures where theres a single hard light source that needs to be diffused. In the case of LEDs, you're often dealing with a panel of quite a few of them. It demands another type of paradigm I think. Some kind of diffusion panel that slides over the LEDs or shining into a frame of some sort to make it a much bigger source.

With 500 sources distributed over a couple of square feet (Flolights) would you even need a diffuser?

Fluorescent lights are softlights and you don't need diffusion. The LEDs from Flolights are a little harder and need some diffusion when used in close.

All depends upon the spot angle people choose when making an LED panel. I'm choosing 30 degree type LED spot for our panel so it will be quite a "beam" type fixture. 45 degree or greater would give you more of a soft output panel. I figured its better to make it a bit hard, give it some throw and then people can diffuse if they want to with accessories.

Wise choices Richard.
Gary