Best Tungsten/Daylight switchable LED panels and on-camera lights?

[Michael Shu]

Hi Guys,

We've been working with on camera, daylight balanced LED lights for a couple of years and want to make the plunge into the nice color temp adjustable LEDs out there. What would you guys recommend as handy lights for either on the stand or on the camera? We're going to go to many events and run and gun with these so the most convenient power options will be best. Thanks a bunch for the recommendations, guys!

 

[Hywel Phillips]

I had poor luck with cheap Chinese panels, but have found the Gekko Kelvin Tiles to be lovely to work with. Continuously variable colour temperature as well as dimmable, and powered by V-lock or out of the wall. In fact 6 different LEDs on the panels which allows party gel colours straight from the light with an additional DMX box, you can control in Kelvin temperature-plus-tint or RGB or even all 6 LED intensities individually over the range 0-255 should you need to.

Colour rendition is streets ahead of any other LED I've used because of the multiple colour LEDs. On my Scarlet it is a very close match to both Tungsten and Daylight at the respective settings.

Don't underestimate how useful it is to be able to vary the colour so precisely. It saves EVER having to use CT or party gels, which give very bad results on most LEDs because the gel absorption spectrum interacts in unpredictable ways with the spiky spectrum of the lights and the dyes in the camera's RGB sensors.

The one drawback it has is that it isn't the brightest panel out there, because at any given colour temperature some of the six component colours are turned quite a long way down to get the colour rendition right. I use two or three of them clamped to a C-stand as my key light if the location is very dark, that works wonders for my leading ladies- nice and flattering soft light, and you can add a flattering slight warm tint to skin tones by subtracting a few hundred degrees to the colour temperature.

http://www.gekkotechnology.com/kelvintile.htm

http://www.creativevideo.co.uk/index.php?t=product/gekko_kit-kt-vp

Cheers, Hywel.