Thanks, Michael - good to know. I'll plan to pick up the softbox when I pick up one of the LED 600's.

As Michael said (Thanks Michael!), its a different design than the other softboxes and requires a different speedring. We wanted something new, fresh and easy to setup as well to go along with the whole idea behind these fixtures which is to make everything as portable and compact as possible. So the "speed softbox" is just that, fast to setup without the rods of the older style "studio" softbox.

Yeah, I'm not a fan of the rods, honestly. I always make sure to wear my glasses when I'm fiddling with those because I have visions of those things snapping up and nailing me in the face. "It's all fun and games until someone loses an eye...". :)

Thanks, Richard.

Are you ever going to make a Sony BP battery mount, for the EX batteries? I would really love this!

Was just shooting with a 600 this weekend - something I'm noticing is that LED panels can't be compared directly with either fluorescent or incandescent in terms of 'hardness' as they really combine aspects of both. You get a reasonably diffuse light which is flattering to faces, similar to a flo - but you also get hard specular highlights which tend to highlight oil, sweat, etc on your subject's face. Haven't tried the softbox yet but an opal over the panel definitely smoothes out the highlights.

I didn't have any plans to make the BP adapter at this time but you never know in the future if its popular enough and enough call for it we may do. The mold fees are really high for this kind of thing so there has to be a lot of call for it to pay that back.

Evan - what's an "opal"? Are you talking about the diffuser that ships with the LED 256?

Hi:

Opal is a very common grade of diffusion.

Dan

battery voltage
 

Hi,

I got some LED600 fixtures from CoolLights and I'm wondering about which battery to choose. I've seen you guys using the NP-970 style batteries but that only gives 7.2 volts and the lights need 10-24v. This might be a silly question but how can the lights operate from a smaller voltage supply? Any advice here, Richard?

Thanks,
Zsolt

Hi Zsolt,

That's the LED 256 that runs on that particular battery. It's not meant for the LED 600 at all. You need either a lead acid type battery belt like some that Bescor makes, or in general any battery solution that provides a standard 4 pin XLR output.

An AB mount type or a V lock type is another choice but you need the interface we sell to go with either of those. I don't generally recommend that someone buy those though unless they already happen to have some for their camcorder. Its a tradeoff of size/weight for cost basically as those AB or V types are quite a bit more expensive.

BTW Richard, what should the runtime be on the LED256 with Sony 950 or 970 battery.
I ask because mine are draining pretty fast.

I was getting about 90 minutes with the Sony batteries on the LED256.

Dan

90 minutes or so is about right.

filters
 

Can someone tell me what do the full,1/2,1/4 factors mean in the filter namings? In particular, I'm interested in how many stops of light do they cut down from the overall output of a source.

Thanks,
Zsolt

According to Rosco International a full CTO filter is 1.1 stop loss, 1/8 CTO is .1 stop loss, etc... Next to their sample images is a spectral chart icon which tells you the amount of light absorbed from each filter.