(upbeat music) – One of the key components to leveling up the quality of your videos is to have a good key light, but when you’re searching for a light, it’s easy to become
overwhelmed with the choices and some of the pretty high prices. My name is Tom and this
is The Enthusiasm Project, and today I wanna review
the FalconEyes RX-18, which I’ve been using as my main key light for about the past five
months, almost six months. And this is not a
sponsored video in any way. I actually bought this light based on the recommendation
of Gary at The Everyday Dad which is an awesome channel that you should definitely check out.
So just to get a few of
the specs out of the way, I purchased this light for just under $400 and that’s usually
about what it sells for. It came with some awesome accessories that I’m gonna go over and
explain in a little bit. This is an 18-inch, flexible LED panel. It’s the first flexible light I’ve used and I love it, it’s awesome,
it is a bi-color light, and best of all, this
light is insanely bright. You probably heard me talk about this in a few other videos, but a lot of times, I have it as an overhead light right here while I’m filming B-roll footage.
And in those cases, I
have the brightness set to like 5% or 1% even sometimes. Right now, it’s lighting up
pretty much this whole room and it’s at 85%. It’s really bright light,
there’s a lot to love about it, but before we get into that, let’s explain where I was coming from. So this is not a super scientific review.
There are people who are much
better at that than I am. Last year, I made a video
about my favorite video light that I was using, which was
this $85 fluorescent light that I have found on Amazon. For 85 bucks, it’s an amazing light. In that video though, I mentioned that my biggest
criticism was the durability. And wouldn’t you know it? After about a year, I did
actually break the part that lets you adjust tilting
the light up and down. So now it’s sort of stuck in one position and if you push it too
far in one direction, gravity takes over and
it just kind of falls.
So it’s not reliable anymore. The light itself still works. It’s just the mount that broke. And I spent about 45
minutes trying to fix it and at that point, I was, like, “I’m spending 45 minutes
on this $85 light. “Maybe it’s time to just
upgrade to a better light.” And one of the big reasons
I wanted to upgrade too was because my old light did
take up quite a bit of space. It had fluorescent bulbs,
and then a pretty big softbox to get that nice soft lighting. My first impulse when
searching for a new light was to jump straight to
Aputure and look at the 120Ds. Those are kind of like the
standard YouTube light right now, and we also have several of them at work. They are amazing lights. They’re probably my
favorite video light overall because they’re just so well-made, so versatile, such high quality. But unfortunately, in this
room, I don’t have the space for something like an Aputure 120D, especially with the light dome on it, which makes it a huge light. And if I’m getting that light, I want the big light dome
so that it’s really soft.
So having a flexible LED
panel that is super bright and only is about five inches deep with the softbox attached is great. It takes up so much less space, I’m not bumping into it anymore, and most importantly, I’m not
bumping it into my equipment and causing accidents, which is something that
I have done in the past. So the FalconEyes light is what I’m using as
my key light right now, but for me to tell you all about it, I need to show it to you,
which means I need to switch to my old video light that I have set up. I’m also gonna switch to a wider lens. But before I switch, this
is the FalconEyes light that I’m using as my key
light at 85% brightness which is normally what I
keep it at for this shot. I’m gonna switch to my old light just so you can see a comparison. This is gonna be full
brightness of my old light.
(finger snaps) And this is my old video light. What you might notice is
that it’s not quite as bright as the FalconEyes flight. And also, even though I did the nice, little snap editing trick, there is a bigger chunk of
time between that transition because this is a fluorescent light which takes a bit more time to warm up and reach full brightness. The FalconEyes, since it’s an LED light is just fully bright right away.
So this is the FalconEyes RX-18. This is in its softbox. Basically, what you end up with are these metal, clampy mount things that go into the back of the light itself. And then this is what
mounts on your light stand. I will say, which is really
nice compared to my old light, this part here, this frame, is all metal, and this mount is also made out of metal so it feels very sturdy, very strong. I don’t think I’m gonna
have any of the problems that I had with my old light with it. But if I do, it’s detachable, so I could replace just this part, whereas in the old light, it
was just built-in entirely and I had no choice but to
replace the light itself. This is 1% brightness. I mean, it’s pretty comfortable here. As soon as I get closer to like 5 or 10%, turn it all the way up to 100%, a little bit of heat is generated but nothing uncomfortable at all. It doesn’t raise the
temperature of the room, doesn’t burn you or get
that hot or melt anything. And like I mentioned,
it is a bi-color light, so I usually keep it at
5,550 degrees Kelvin, which I think looks the best.
My camera’s usually at 4,400 degrees. That just seems to give the
results that I like the best. But it can go all the way to
5,600, which is very blue, very daylight balanced. And then it can go all the
way in the other direction to 3,000 degrees, which is much warmer. What I’m reaching for over here is actually the light’s controller. This is one of the things maybe I don’t like so
much about the light. It has this controller box right here. There’s a power switch on the side. And then this is all touch screen, so you can adjust the light
just by tapping on here. It’s super responsive.
It feels really durable. It’s made out of metal. I have no issues with this. The problem is the
power brick is separate. It does come with a little mount that you can mount on the back of this but then you end up with
this big, bulky thing. This does have a V-mount on it. So if you have V-mount battery, you can power this whole
light with your battery. I don’t have one, so I just
have to keep this big bundle on my desk at all times, and that’s how I turn
the light on and off. So let’s take a look at the light itself. Right now this is in the softbox, which the kit that I bought
included the softbox. As you can see, it’s not very big at all. But the way that you put
this on is very easy. It comes with a sheet of diffusion that’s just held in with Velcro. And then you can see
there’s some reflector. Here’s the panel itself. And this is really all the softbox is. It’s kind of just like a frame.
And this is the actual light. You can see the rows of LEDs. They’re alternating warm and cool. As with most bi-color lights, you do get the full amount of brightness when you have both LEDs being mixed. There, this is 100%. This is really bright. And since the back of the
light does have Velcro on it, you can attach this other places. You can put Velcro straps on the wall. You can put it inside of cars. You can put it in all
these different locations just using Velcro. No pun intended, but the flexibility that this light affords you is awesome. I kinda wanna get a second one of these, so that way, I have one
that I can use like this and do all kinds of cool stuff with. And then have my main one just sitting in the softbox ready to go all the time. So it does come in a little case, which whether or not these are useful kind of depends on you.
Since this light is durable
enough to travel with, you might actually find
yourself using this case to bring it around with
some of the accessories. One of the things it comes with is like a China ball attachment. So if you go camping and you know the frustration
of setting up a tent, that’s pretty much what this is. This fits here like that
and it goes over here. And then this fits in (object clacks) There we go.
I did it inside out. Once you get it, you
end up with this globe, almost like a China ball. Everything just attaches with Velcro. Now this is giving off
just beautiful, soft light, and it’s basically going
at least 180 degrees. If not, even a little bit under the light because it’s bouncing off of the room. So if you want really soft
light, this is the way to go, especially if you’re
using an overhead light, maybe you have two of
these and you’re getting just this beautiful
soft, no shadows light. The softbox is my favorite, obviously. The fact that there’s Velcro along the whole border of the light also means that behind the light, there’s virtually no light leak. Pop our diffuser back on. Everything just has Velcro all around it. And speaking of Velcro, do you know what kind of
bird really sticks around? A vel-crow.
But it does also come with one more thing, which is a honeycomb grid. If you’ve got trypophobia, I’m sorry. So whatever people call
this, a grid, a web, a honeycomb, whatever,
I call it the dark web, if you’re somebody who’s
getting a big light and you want it to be
a soft, diffused light, I really recommend getting
this for your light or getting a light that comes
with it because what it does is it lets you direct diffused lighting.
Normally, if you have a light
that has like barn doors on it or something, you can direct that light, but the direction creates
really harsh shadows. So what this does is all
of these little squares direct the light but they
don’t create harsh shadows. So normally I don’t use this
for my talking headshots because I like everything
to be big and bright, and I don’t mind that the light is lighting up the rest of the room. But there are a lot of times
when I’m filming product B-roll where I love to have this on
the light as its overhead.
And that way, it’s directing all the soft light right on the table, but the background is staying
kind of dark and moody, and I think that that
looks really, really good. This is a really simple way to totally change how
you’re using your light. Now there’s one more
thing I wanna go over, and even though I’m not a lighting expert, I do wanna talk quickly
about the color accuracy because I feel like this light is much more color accurate
than my old light was. And I don’t know if that’s just because
it’s a better light overall or if it’s an LED versus fluorescent thing or because you can fine-tune
the color temperature, but I have just found that
I’ve gotten much better results in the time that I’ve had this light. And one way to kind of look at that, I’ve got this little thing rigged up here. If you ever watch Peter Gregg, he has an amazing
photo/video YouTube channel. If you click on the
descriptions in his videos, he’ll send you one of these for free, but he calls it the Right White and it’s a white balancing
tool and it works really well.
It’s like this very hard,
rigid, plastic thing, and it’s a very good
representation of the color white. And I thought, for a long time actually, I was using my chair as
a white balance tool, but when I got this, I realized my chair’s
actually not pure white, it’s kind of off-white. This is pure white, so this is what it looks like
with the FalconEyes light. Knowing that I’m not at
daylight temperature, I’m at 5,550 and my camera’s at 4,400 and I’m filming on a Canon camera, which has Canon colors that usually lean a little more towards the
magenta and the warm side, but this is what it looks like.
This is what a pure
white object looks like in that situation. Now let’s switch over to my old light just so you can see a
little bit of a difference. So this is the FalconEyes, and this is my old fluorescent light. It still looks good,
it’s a little bit dimmer, but what I have noticed is this light has a bit more of a green hue to it and the FalconEyes has a much
warmer magenta tone to it. It’s almost like Sony versus
Canon color science in a way. Totally usable, totally adaptable. I’ve used this light for a long, long time in many, many videos,
but I have just found that I get a better result
with the FalconEyes light. So I think the basic light kit, if you just want the light by itself, is closer to like $320, usually. For about, I think it’s
380, you get the kit that has everything I have here.
But for under $400, I think
this is an incredible deal. You get a great light, you
get all kinds of accessories that make it really
usable, really versatile, it’s super durable, and it works great. I actually, like I said,
especially making this video, I’m pretty convinced that
I wanna get a second one. So that way, I can have one to flex and do all the cool, weird stuff with, and then another one to just
sit up there as my key light. And two of them would still cost less than a more expensive video light.
Once you move past your camera work, learning to pay attention to your audio and your lighting are
the two biggest things that are gonna improve
your overall video quality. So if those are the things
that you spend your time on and you invest your time wisely, I think you will be
delighted with the results. That was a very dumb way to end the video. I just wanted to make the delighted pun. (upbeat music).
