Today, we're discussing a
line of new lighting products from iFootage. And if
you're anything like me, you probably heard that and thought, wait, there's gonna be yet another
player in the lighting game. Do we really need that? But I quickly changed my mind
about them when I actually received and started testing these lights, they are excellent and offer
more quality per dollar than most of the other options
out there at the moment, which I suppose should be no
surprise considering just how fantastic a lot of the other
products from iFootage are, like their monopod and friction arms.
So today we're gonna take
a mostly unscripted look at these new lights, but first I need to
provide some disclosure. iFootage sent me these lights
for free to make this video. They also compensated me
monetarily to produce this video and prioritize it to release
alongside their launch. Because of this, I'm
not declaring this video an official review,
but more of a showcase. But I made them aware
that I'll still be voicing any criticisms I have
with these lights to you, and that they won't be
able to preview my video before I post it, and
they were okay with that, which I think speaks to their
ethics and product quality. The way I approach sponsored
content is that I don't agree to make the video regardless
of the money offered if I don't think the product
is worth recommending to you, and I don't discuss
sponsorship rates until after I've tested the product to see if I'm willing to cover it.
And in this case, I
really like these lights, so I was happy to get paid
to prioritize the creation and scheduling of this video. But ultimately it's up to
you to decide if you think this content is useful
and reasonably objective. Lastly, just a reminder to be
vigilant about comment spam on YouTube. Comments from me will always have a verified check mark, and there are no prizes or
giveaways on this video. So any comments suggesting
that are fraudulent and should be reported. Okay, now let's talk about these lights. As you can see, I have sort of a messy shot today compared to when I normally do this because I'm gonna do all
the tests and everything for you on camera here. And
like I said, mostly unscripted. So we've got three different COB lights, and then there's also a little
pocket LED we'll talk about.
For the three COB lights, they come in three different intensities, or powers, or sizes. This one here is the SL1 60DN, which is their smallest,
little 60 watt light. And then we have two larger ones. This one is the SL1 220DN.
So it's a 220 watt light. And then finally this
one, which is the largest, is the SL 320DN, a 320 watt light. Now both of the 320 the
220 are basically identical when it comes to the control
box, the layout, the cables, pretty much everything like that. It's just the power that's different, but the 60 watt is quite
interesting and quite different. And it's my favorite little
60 watt COB on the market, and I would argue it's
the best one when it comes to build quality and feature set, because often in this category, you either get a big chunker
one to be metal and it, and it's sort of a strange
light that has limitations, or you get a nice value one that's small but it's made of plastic.
This one is a nice blend between all, it's all metal construction,
all three of them are, and the powering options are great. So the interface is very
simple. As you can see, we just have the two knobs
and a screen, power button, and then two different power sources. We have the DC plug
and we also have USB-C. So what's great about this
is you can use the DC plug. There's a DC power adapter that
comes in this carrying case here that you can use to plug
into the wall for mains power, but there's also some accessories
that iFootage provides that you can use on that same DC plug. So one would be this for example, which is a v-mount handle for your light that has the little spigot on top there.
So you would loosen off the
yoke, and the yoke is actually pretty strong on this for
its–all the pieces are metal. So you just slide it into this
little spigot attachment here and then you can lock it down. I'm sure you can intuit
where we're going with this. And then you plug this into
the DC port and then you slot a v-mount battery in the front here. And then you get a little, your Hollywooding, a little
60 watt light with the, with the v-mount battery. And
this uses a mini Bowens Mount, which they have an adapter
for, as you can see, you'd put the light on
here for the mini Bowens, and then you could attach
your regular size modifiers that you would use for the Bowens Mount.
But now the USB-C port is
something I wasn't expecting. If you have a 100 watt power
delivery USB-C power bank, like the one I have here from Zendure. So you just plug this
in to USB-C, turn it on. I don't know what setting we're at here. So we're at 50% power. So we're just gonna turn the
left knob here to turn it down. Turn it slowly, it moves
slowly. Turn it aggressively, and it goes down quite quickly for you.
And then the right one is for
changing functions in the menu and that kind of thing. But anyway, it tells
me the power draw right on my Zendure device here
that you can probably see here when it's off. And then as we turn the power up, you can see how much power
we're, we're gonna draw here. So if we put it at, say, 20%, then now you can see that
we need about 17 watts. And if we go up to,
I'm just over half now, you can now see that it
needs 44 watts or so, and at 100% power, almost at 80 watts. So it says they need 100 watts, but seemingly you can get away with 80, but how cool is this? We've got a 60 watt COB running just on a USB-C power delivery device.
I'm a big fan of this. Now I'll show you the
effects on the light, but I'm going to not enable
them just so that the flashing lights doesn't bother any of my viewers, but hopefully you can see
here, fireworks, lightning, paparazzi, welding,
strobe, explosion, pulsing, and faulty bulb. Now these are obviously
just daylight effects. There's no color. So if you want color, you're gonna have to gel the light. And then in the menu of all these lights, we have control over the fan speed, but I have a subnote on that
that I'll get to in one second. We have control over the dimming curve so whether you want it to
have a linear response or, you know, ramp up as you
get higher towards 100%. The Bluetooth, because these
are controllable over an app, which we'll get to as well, language, and then version for updating firmware, and you can update the
firmware with the app.
But to give you an idea
of the amount of fan noise that this makes this is with
it on quiet, and I can see, and maybe you can too, the
fan is spinning in there, and this is what it sounds like, right under the microphone, by the way. I can't even hear it here. I have to, I have to
literally put it to my ear, like, this close, in order
to be able to hear it.
Now, the chip on the 60 watt,
as well as the 220, 320, they're not exactly the same, but they are getting similar results in terms of photometrics. I validated the results that
iFootage provides, probably, in their documentation, or
the website, or whatever, when these lights come out. I validated them with my C-800, and I'll do a test and
share that with you as well, but there are some
differences in terms of the, the firmware and a little
bit on the controlling, because the 220 and the
320 use this control box, and I don't have the latest
firmware for these yet because the ones they
sent me are pre-production and they weren't able to
get the firmware updates. So they actually have to
send me new control boxes that are gonna be like the ones
that the consumers would get that can, that can update the firmware. I do have one minor complaint
though, regarding fans. And it has to do with the control unit. iFootage has a fan on the
bottom of the control unit that also makes a little bit of noise, which is something that
first generation lights of a lot of these brands
had and then they moved away from it from their second generation, something that I appreciate on Aputure.
So I'm hoping that maybe future, if iFootage makes gen two
of these lights, you know, in the future, that maybe
they can look to see, maybe make the, the control
box a little bit bigger and use a passive cooling system, just so you don't have to have that fan, you don't have to calculate, where am I gonna put the control box? Where am I gonna put the light
head? That kind of thing, 'cause you only have the one
sound source to worry about. That being said, it's
not particularly loud. I will turn this light on now
and we can talk a little bit about it's noise and the
controls and that kind of thing. Now, one thing you might notice is that even though I just went and plugged the light
in, it didn't turn on.
And that's because in its current state, these lights don't have
a studio mode. You know, one of those settings where
you can have the light turn on or off automatically just
with power being provided versus needing to physically turn it on. This can be handy if you
like to run your things through a separate power
source, or turn it off if you are at home and you
don't want it to turn on, if say your power turns on and off, or you reset the breaker, or whatever. So we've got the fan settings, we've got the dimming curve
just like with the other light, we've got the Bluetooth
controls again for the app. We've got DMX because there
is a DMX port on the top here, which is the, sort of, smaller
three pin, little LEMO style connector up here, and then
language, and restore settings.
And before I move on to the photometrics, which are excellent on these lights, I do have to make a couple more complaints about the control box, which I think is probably
the weakest point of all these lights is the
control box for the 320 and 220. The dial here that you use
to adjust everything is, it's not great. I, I don't just wanna make
frivolous complaints about it, but compared to other dials I've used, there's oftentimes where
your thumb kind of slips and it doesn't completely
turn the way you want it to.
It just, it doesn't
turn nicely is how, how, I don't really know
how else to describe it if I'm trying to give notes to the manufacturer to make it better. And the only other thing,
if I were to be nitpicky, is I kind of wish that
one of the power cables, the one that went to the wall,
was coming outta the bottom. And the one that went to light
was coming outta the top, that wat you'd have sort of a,
a flow and you wouldn't have, you know, multiple cords, kind of, tangled together at the top.
That being said though, the
cord lengths are excellent. The one that goes from the
control box to the light head is, like, three meters or 10
feet long. So that's plenty if you wanted to have the
control box on the floor and have the light, you
know, 10 feet in the air. And the one that goes from the control box to the wall is even longer. It's, like, almost five
meters or 16 feet long. And they're high quality cables with locking connectors on them. So no complaints about that. Good length, good quality cables. And they come with Velcro
cable ties as well. I should also mention these little lights before we move on to
the rest of the tests. These are HL1 C4, little
pocket LED lights. Although, you know, bad
choice here, they sent me the, the green one and the yellow one. And it clearly shows that
there's a purple one. They didn't send that one to me. Anyway, full RGB little pocket lights, similar to what you'd expect
from, like, an Aputure MC.
It's got a similar little
display on them there, you can adjust, you can
put them in CCT mode, you can put them in hue
mode, cycle through them. You know, you've seen
these little pocket lights before. There's not much to say about them. They have a removable shoe thing. So you could put them into
the hot shoe of your camera, or you could just take
it off and attach it with a 1/4-20 wherever you wanted. Controls are good. They've got a rugged
sort of rubber outside. They're a fine little pocket LED, don't have much to say about them, but if you were, say,
shopping for the big lights and you're like, you
know, I need a pocket LED while I'm at it.
Well then, they've got a couple of those for you to choose from as well. Four different colors, I
think, including black. I'll also mention about the
carrying cases real quick, 'cause this is another exception. I have the one here for the 60 watt, but I don't have the ones
yet for the 220 and the 320, but I'll do a, but they're sending, they're on the way to me.
So I'll do a quick test to make sure that they're, they're fine. And then I will insert
something in the video now from future Gerald, let you
know what I think of the cases.
Okay. So it's future Gerald here. It's a couple weeks later.
I've got new control boxes that were shipped to me from iFootage. This one and the other one, I think they're both the
final retail versions now instead of prototypes. And I've got it connected
to the 220DN over here, and I'll just tell you about
a few of the improvements. So the dial is now much more tactile and it's not as stubborn
as the other one was. I wouldn't say that it's perfect, but I would say it's
definitely in the passable, good zone now instead of
worrisome like the other one. So that's great to see.
That's not an issue, power button's not an issue. We still have a fan on the
bottom of the control box though. And that doesn't seem like
it's going away anytime soon, but the fan modes are now
updated on the 220 and 320, so let's turn on the light here.
And as you can see, I'm running at 100%, and right now the fan mode,
as you can see, is on auto. Now look at the light
behind me and you can see that it's full blast. Now
the fan is not running yet. So auto means that once it
reaches a certain temperature based on a temperature
sensor on the heat sink, I think in the light, it will turn on the fan as necessary and will ramp up the fan as the temperature rises intuitively from, I think, only a couple
hundred RPM up to 3,000 RPM if you really need it. Now, I have noticed that in this climate
controlled studio setting, I was running this light on
100% for maybe 10, 15 minutes before the fan actually kicked on. And then it only kicked on at a low speed.
So you might be able to get
away with never hearing the fan, even on 100%. However, if you wanna make sure the fan is on a quiet setting, like
a low RPM all the time, then you can come in here and
change this fan mode to quiet by just pressing this button. But watch the light behind
me when I do press it. You see how the light
behind me just got dimmer? And if we go back to the
intensity, you can see it's at 40%. Now, if we can increase
the light from here and if we do increase it back up to 100%, now when we go look at the fan, we'll see it set the fan back to auto.
So you can, sort of,
smartly switch between them. But if you just set it to
quiet, it'll cap it at 40%. And if you change the intensity
lower than 40% like this, and then go into the menu,
it still stays on quiet. And that will make it so the fan can never exceed a certain RPM. Now there's one more fan
mode, which is ultra quiet, this one. Now you'll see
the light got even dimmer behind me, and that's because
if we go to intensity, it's set to 25% and the fan will not run.
So if you're at 25% or lower
and you set it to ultra quiet, the fan will never come on.
So that's your silent mode. Now on ultra quiet, you'll see that you can't
increase the output past 25% and that's because the fan is set to off, so you can't exceed 25%. It's only the quiet
and auto that, kind of, have a little fluidity
between changing modes based on the output.
And something I also
like about these lights is how they actually show
you the RPM of your fan right up here. It's not
completely necessary, but it's nice to know if you're
somebody that likes to know all the information about your products. I also have the cases
for the 220 and 320 now, which are great. I, I'm not
gonna make a big review of them.
That's the logo by the
way, for the Anglerfish. And then inside. This one's mostly empty, but it's got well formed
cutaways for the reflector, your cables, control box,
and then the lamp head that goes right here. It's
well padded, it's a solid case. Looks good, and it's nice and rugged, so. Now I have a whole video on
the different light readings, and photometrics, and what they
mean, and what's important, and what manufacturers are
trying to fool you with, and what ones you should care about.
It's a whole separate video
that I did on the sekonic. I recommend go and check that out if you don't know what these numbers mean, but I'll give you the results
now. This is basically just to validate what iFootage is saying because they are providing
some seriously strong numbers for photometrics for these lights. So let's get a reading. I'd say I'm a, just about a meter away. I'm not worried too much
about the power that, I've already tested it and the, the output numbers that
they give are accurate. This is more about the, the color quality. So you can see, I got around
8,500 lux around a meter away, but I am getting a 0.5 green
correction requirement, but I have found that it doesn't
seem to look particularly bad on the skin tones. You don't, you can't really notice it. And again, I'll show those in a minute. Now, when we actually get into the color, as I explain in my Sekonic video, CRI is one that doesn't
really matter that much, but I got about 98, which I
think is what iFootage said.
So validated that. And then for the TLCI, you
get a ridiculous result of 99. And in some cases on these
lights at certain power settings, you can get 100 TLCI. Again, probably not the best
measurement source for this, but the TM30 is a good one to check. And this one shows you
like I, like I said, watch that if you wanna more,
but basically this circle, you probably can't even
tell that both circles are overlapping perfectly. That means that all the colors
for both hue and saturation are pretty well lined up.
And you can see right here, it's getting a 98 in terms of, you know, are the colors right? And
101 in terms of saturation, that means it's just
slightly oversaturated, just but 1% oversaturated. If both these numbers were
100, it would be perfect.
It's darn near perfect. And
then SSI is another one that's good. This tells
you how well this light matches a known source. And as we can see here, if
we're matching it to daylight, which is what these lights
are, then we get an 84, which you can see in the SSI. Basically what that means,
it's getting a score of 84 when compared to perfect actual daylight. And you can compare this to tungsten and that kinda thing as well. This is the highest I've ever
seen for an SSI of a light that's been sent to me. Normally for, if you
wanna score in the 80s, you have to compare it to
tungsten, and you have to do it, use a tungsten light, but for daylight, you're normally only in the 70s. And I can prove this by
just turning off this light and turning on the key light that I use. And if I just take a reading right here, you can see that the
Aputure light scored a 75, which up to this point, we
consider to be, you know, that's what you get with a daylight COB, but these iFootage
lights are pulling an 84.
So they're gonna be much
better for daylight. And what we can see by
this is if we look at the, the chart here on the
Aputure light, you see, so the red boxes are correct
daylight. You see how the, the COBs generally have
a problem with blue? These blue channels are way
too high and out of whack, but on the iFootage light, you can see that we are so
much closer to the red boxes and the blues aren't that
much higher.
That's great. If you're looking for a light
that more closely matches daylight as a source, these
iFootage lights are the best I've ever tested for that. Let's talk for quick second about the app while I have it here. So
this is the Anglerfish app. And as you can see,
we've got the 220 here. And if I added the 320 and 60, they would just appear in boxes below. And then we have all devices
here. It's very intuitive. The app works easily.
This little toggle here. If I tap that, turns the light off. Tap it again, turns the light on. And you can also turn on and
off the entire project up here, which would be all of the
lights in the box below. The cog there is for firmware update. It pairs extremely quickly,
which I like as well. There is a difference
between the 220 and 320, it has to do with the, the yoke system. So on the 220, as you can
see, it's just a simple, you know, wing net style thing here, and inside there is an umbrella holder that you can see right there.
The yoke on this one is strong enough, I've found, for their light modifiers. It does require you to tighten
it, tighten it quite a bit, but it does do the job, but
it is more of a smaller style, you know, yoke. But all metal parts. But the 320 has the. But the 320 has the larger style one that is capable of fully, you know, going around the light.
So if you're worried about, it doesn't have that issue at all. So it goes 360 all the
way around the light, and it provides plenty of clearance here and uses a heavy duty, hand
break style lock for it. All metal, well made, but no
umbrella holder on this one. Okay, so just for consistency, let's Jack up the power
on the 60 watt here and then shine it. And let's take a quick reading of that. Okay. So as you can see again, I'm still not getting quite
5,600 kelvin, 54 something, and not as big of a
correction required for green, only 0.3 at 100%.
And then I'm getting about 5,700
lux at roughly a meter way. I didn't really measure
it. SSI is 84, again, just like we measured before,
and 98, again, on the CRI. So very consistent across the lights here. And that's what the SSI
spectrum looks like. So again, really good control
over those blues there. Now let's shine it on my face. Okay, so this is the first
little test shot here. I've got no modifiers
on that light at all, not even the reflector,
it's just a bare chip, and I'm at 9.3% on the app, and I'm using the app
and it's working well. And I've got just a couple
little subjects here on the secondary camera.
The
white balance is not changing. They're locked on the
camera so that, you know, what you see is what
you get as we go through so you can see the
difference in the light. And the color quality, as
you can see, is fantastic. And yeah, my skin is
maybe a slight bit pinker because of that green
correction that's required because I've corrected
the other lights for that. Now there is an advantage
in having a brand new light start this way because LEDs
tend to green up over time. So you'd rather have them start needing a little bit of green correction, and then once you break the light in, it'll land more in that zero spot. So being a little bit magenta
upfront is a good thing. Now, these colors look good and, you know, I'm reasonably happy with this.
I didn't wanna put any
modifiers until you could see what the skin tones look like. Obviously it's really spotty. Okay, so now I'm just gonna
take the Bowens adapter thing for the 60 watt and an umbrella, because there's an umbrella
holder on the Bowens adapter, there isn't one on the light, normally. I'm attach this to the 60 watt and see what that looks light. Looks light. Looks like, saying light too much, and see how it looks with,
with a bit of a cheap modifier, if you will, behind it. Let's turn this back off. Okay. And so now I'm behind an umbrella and the umbrella is probably about a, the umbrella itself is about
a meter and a half away, and the light is behind that. So we're at quite a distance
for a small light like that. And then the umbrella, the
umbrella might change the, the color a little bit. So we
can't exactly factor that in, depends on what umbrella you're using. That's why I did the first
test without modifiers. But just to give you an
idea of like, you know, what kind of really cost
effective, sort of, light shaping that you can do as a bit of a key light.
Colors still look pretty good. Again, I'm noticing the
slight temperature change since putting the umbrella
on, but gimme one second. So that's with the rest of the lights, and then if we just adjust
the intensity of the 60 watt, I'd say somewhere around
there, do it quick. That's 56%. So just over half power. And then I put my regular lights on, but the other lights that
are usually in front of me aren't on at all. So to give
you an idea, this is off. That's, that's all the accessory lights, and then that's just the iFootage 60 watt through an umbrella. But I think it looks pretty
good. And like I said, overall, I'm really happy with these lights, especially that 60 watt, I'm
kind of obsessed with it. I think like, like I said, when it comes to quality per dollar, I don't think there's a better
60 watt light on the market if you're looking for just
something small for, you know, a little home studio work, or even just as, like, a kicker
or something, it's a really, really good light.
And
if you need more power, the 220 and 320 offer the same high SSI, great daylight reliability
as the other ones for a really good price with
really great build quality, again, better build
quality than you should, than you would normally
expect from that price point. So this is a really good
lineup and a really good entry into lighting from iFootage. And I'm excited to see where they take it. Possible notes for the future, I would love to see a
studio mode on these lights that turns on and off when you
provide power automatically. And if there's gonna be
v2's of these lights, I'd like to see, sort of,
an updated control box in the 220 and 320 that
maybe gets rid of the fan, spruces up the dial a little
bit. But other than that, this is a really, really
impressive first step into lighting from iFootage. Good job. Alright… I'm done..
