– One of the best ways to level
up your videos is lighting. And in this video we're
gonna be taking a look at the Neewer NL 660s, a budget
bicolor lighting kit that's packed full of features, has a pretty solid build quality, and we're gonna see how these
compare to some of the other lights on the market, coming up. (upbeat music) What's up? Sean Cannell here with Think Media, bringing you the best tips and tools for building your influence
with online video. And I'm excited to be
looking at the Neewer NL 660s today and doing a quick review. Now we've had our hands on
these lights for a while now, and we've been able to use
them in a couple different situations, and they've
been holding up great and producing some really cool results. So let's break down all of the features, the price, and everything
that you need to know. So the retail price for this
kit is right around $160. Of course, you can always
find coupons and sales, and it, sort of, hovers
around $130 on Amazon.
That's how much we paid
when we picked up this kit. And that is for the Neewer NL 660s, which means you get 660 LED
bulbs inside of the lights. And so what you get is
the two LED light panels. You get the barn doors that
come mounted on the lights. These are detachable. You probably need a flathead
screwdriver to loosen up these four screws right here
to remove the barn doors. Of course, barn doors are nice
for controlling the direction of your light and eliminating spill, so we leave those mounted on there. You also have the diffusion plates, which come mounted on the lights. And you're able to
remove those by pressing in this little plastic piece right here, and then the diffusion plate slides out, revealing just the raw
LED bulbs underneath.
And when you order the 660s,
they come with a couple cases for the LED lights, themselves. Pretty basic, but a nice
way to travel with these. Put them in this padded case and then you can keep
the lights protected. Then you get the two power
cables and power adapters so you can plug these into the wall, and two light stands included in the kit. Now the reason we love bicolor LED lights here at Think Media is
because it gives you a lot of versatility when
it comes to your lighting. What bicolor means is that
actually out of the 666 bulbs, 330 of them are, kind of, a white daylight color temperature, 5600 Kelvin, and then on
the other side you've got an amber-colored temperature, which is gonna match, maybe,
the lamps in your home and, sort of, that
warmer evening lighting.
You know, when you're paying
around $130 for a kit, you miss out on some of
the features that you get in a more expensive kit,
which is sometimes a digital LED screen, which allows
you to know exactly what color temperature you're at. It's not a big deal. You can always set your
camera to auto white balance or set custom white balance.
And if you want to watch
a video about how we like to do that with a white balance
card, gray balance card, then just click or tap the YouTube card or we'll link to that video
in the description below so your colors always look perfect. Now one of the things you wanna look for when investing in a light
kit is the CRI rating. That is the color-rendering
index, is what that stands for. And if that number is
lower, it typically means you're investing in a
lower-quality light kit, and it's going to affect how good the colors turn out on your video.
So what you're looking
for is a CRI rating of, like, 95, 96, or 97. So for a budget light kit like this, these have a CRI index rating of 96. So at the price, that's pretty impressive and one of the features that we love here. Next up let's talk about build quality. As far as the light stands go, they aren't the worst I've seen, but they're also not the best. I'd probably rate 'em,
like, a six out of ten.
If you were gonna use
these around a home office and not set them up and
tear them down a lot, or should I say, if you
weren't gonna, like, hit the road and expect
to, like, have 'em bang around and really be
beat up and traveling, then they're gonna be fine. They're gonna last for a really long time. What's more impressive is
the LED lights, themselves. They have a really good
aluminum alloy build quality. The barn doors, the
construction, all very solid. One of the things to note
is that when you get these out of the bag, they
actually are mounted in this quarter 20 screw right here, not actually giving you enough clearance
to angle the lights down. So all you have to do when
you get it out of the box, is take these all the way
out and move the lights up to the other mounting
thread on either side.
And then you have the clearance that you need for the lights. Now when we take a look at
the back of the light here, as far as operation goes, you have your on and off switch. And then if you switch
to the battery option, that's how you would power them there. Off is in the middle, and then on is on the right side. You've got the ability to plug in your DC adapter right there. And then you have just the
two knobs, pretty simple. You could turn on the yellow
lights with the top dial, and then the white lights
with the bottom dial, and any combination in between.
Additionally, these light stands
can go as low as 26 inches up from the ground and all
the way up to 75 inches, if you want to raise them up for a shoot, angle 'em down and really light your subject in some creative ways. As far as the best place to pick these up, most camera stores
online should have these. Our favorite is Amazon.com. And they actually have
a bunch of different combinations and kits. Now in just second I want
to share an alternative lighting recommendation
that we compared to these, as well as my final thoughts. But I want to pass the
question off to you, what lighting do you use for your YouTube videos right now? Let me know in the comments section below. And if you've been getting
value out of this video, smash the like button.
So when it comes to how
these lights stack up against others in the market, I really think you can't go wrong here. Neewer is very competitive, and these products are well designed, and, I think, will be more than sufficient for the average streamer,
gamer, YouTube creator, or video-production hobbyist, or even professional to use
and get great results with. I think the most impressive thing is how competitive the price is.
You know, one of our favorite
kits here at Think Media is actually the StudioPRO LED Kit. It's 600 LED bulbs, and
it comes in at $300. Now one of the reasons why we love them is because they're a little bit larger. Even though it's less bulbs,
the bulbs are spread out more, so you get, kind of, a wider spread when it comes to the lighting. The build quality is,
kind of, on par, actually, and they're so much more expensive. I mean, they're over double the price. So even when I compared
these to those lights, I can't really think of a
reason of why I would want to pay $170 more for,
basically, the same thing. Maybe if I wanted the lights spread out, but in this case, these are so nimble. They're so small and they're
so great to just tear down, set up, and shoot your videos. I think that the value proposition is very compelling on these Neewers. However, depending on your budget, you don't even have to
invest as much as a $130 to get a great light kit.
So if you actually want to
see some of the other budget options that we recommend
here at Think Media, then click or tap the YouTube
card to see our playlist on the best budget lighting for YouTube, or we'll put a link to that playlist in the description below. Thanks again for checking out this video. Smash like if you got value and we'll see you in the next one. Peace. (mellow music).
