Hive Lighting Wasp 100-C

[Jules Ameel]

Has anyone checked these out?

Interested in the full spectrum rgb, dc power, and that I can use the modifiers I can use from my Profoto strobe kit. My main concerns is output vs other options, but not sure I would want to spend double the price for something like a DS1.

 

[Matt Bai]

Yep died on a shoot last week. No explanation. And none yet from Hive.

 

[Steve Smith]

I own both Wasp 100-C s and DS1s.

I like them both and find then both useful in there own way. DS1s put out close to a 1k tungsten equivalent, where the Wasp 100-C's meter closer to a 300watt equivalent.

DS1's more for brute power. Wasp 100-C's more for finesse and shaping. Both are great to dial in color you want without gels

-Steve Smith
Los Angeles

 

[Kyle Jones]

I have 3 100-C and find them to be great for what I do (corporate/interview). They are much smaller and cheaper than the DS1 and don't cast multiple shadows due to the single point source. I also love the ease of use/compact nature of using my Profoto softboxes. They are about the same output as a 650 watt tungsten with a 22 degree beam angle. The DS1's have quite a bit more output but again, are more expensive, larger, and require heavy diffusion to remove the multi shadows. The DS1 app is 100x better than the Hive app, though the company tell me they are working to improve that.

In the end, I think the Hive 100-C is great for purchasing a kit you can use for small jobs, where as the DS1 (or DS3/DS6's) you'd want to rent for larger jobs.

 

[Jules Ameel]

Thanks for the insight guys.

Think I'm convinced this would be a good option.

Matt, hope you get your unit repaired. I do feel like the company has a decent reputation, so a lack of communication is surprising.

 

[Mark Spraker]

Yep died on a shoot last week. No explanation. And none yet from Hive.

I got a quick and great response from Hive when I contacted them about potentially needing repairs on a ballast for one of their plasma lights.

Does anyone have any solid info on equivalent output? I've noticed some variation in claims depending on who did the measurement across a few forums. I'm sure color is a factor in this too. Overall the 100-C looks like an interesting light to have at your disposal but I don't see myself needing something like this. I'm usually after raw output more than tinted accent lights.

 

[Kyle Jones]

Does anyone have any solid info on equivalent output? I've noticed some variation in claims depending on who did the measurement across a few forums. I'm sure color is a factor in this too.

Light Labratory Inc. rated them at 427.48 foot candles at 5 feet, which is about the same as a 650 watt tungsten fixture. Haven't had a chance to measure mine but they seem to be as bright as a 650w when used at normal color temperatures (5600/3200).

http://imgur.com/gfqEqhz

(I think the attachment got messed up so here's a link. I'm on mobile.)

 

[Jeff Hendricks]

I have 2 of them now. I bought one new from Adorama late 2017 and loved it enough to get a second later from B&H..

Hive's support is very good so far. My first unit had an issue with Bluetooth app range and the tilt lock. They sent me new hardware that they put on all the units for the tilt (thick spacer/washer) and new vent screen made of plastic (the original's were metal which interfered with the Bluetooth range making it essentially unusable). The bluetooth now works very well. Not perfect, but usable. They said they are working on releasing an updated app with preprogrammed lighting gags (police, fire, etc) which I'm greatly looking forward to.

The second one failed on me in on my first shoot day (bought in near new USED condition from B&H). The light would drop to 10% output and had a funny color cast. I could reset it and it'd work normally for a few minutes before dimming again. Hive had me ship back and they replaced the LED emitter (said it was a manufacturing error).

As far as power output, I'm having issues I've just sent questions to hove about. I'm getting 125fc at 5' with the 22 degree reflector on (at 5600k, 3200k is less). That's 1/4 of the rated output as Kyle posted above and I see on Hive's website and photometric pages. For reference my old Lowel Pro light with 250w tungsten bulb reads 150fc+ at 5' on full flood with a spread of 50 degrees. It looks 2-4 time "more bright" than my 100c. I think my 100c is only pulling 1/4 of the power it should be (the app shows a watt draw and mine indicates 19w at maximum). Hope to hear back from support early next week.

I always thought the output was weak, but I guess I am just used to LED fixtures being VERY optimistic with their photometric claims. The saturation controls are awesome and the lights definitely have their place on many sets. I hope I can figure out my output questions on them. If I can get them higher I'd definitely pick up a few more.

(I do corporate shoots, and small scale music video and narrative work)

 

[Nick Morrison]

We use these a lot. Great hair lights. Controllable via Luminair (alongside Skypanels).

 

[jake southard]

I have 2 of them now. I bought one new from Adorama late 2017 and loved it enough to get a second later from B&H..

Hive's support is very good so far. My first unit had an issue with Bluetooth app range and the tilt lock. They sent me new hardware that they put on all the units for the tilt (thick spacer/washer) and new vent screen made of plastic (the original's were metal which interfered with the Bluetooth range making it essentially unusable). The bluetooth now works very well. Not perfect, but usable. They said they are working on releasing an updated app with preprogrammed lighting gags (police, fire, etc) which I'm greatly looking forward to.

The second one failed on me in on my first shoot day (bought in near new USED condition from B&H). The light would drop to 10% output and had a funny color cast. I could reset it and it'd work normally for a few minutes before dimming again. Hive had me ship back and they replaced the LED emitter (said it was a manufacturing error).

As far as power output, I'm having issues I've just sent questions to hove about. I'm getting 125fc at 5' with the 22 degree reflector on (at 5600k, 3200k is less). That's 1/4 of the rated output as Kyle posted above and I see on Hive's website and photometric pages. For reference my old Lowel Pro light with 250w tungsten bulb reads 150fc+ at 5' on full flood with a spread of 50 degrees. It looks 2-4 time "more bright" than my 100c. I think my 100c is only pulling 1/4 of the power it should be (the app shows a watt draw and mine indicates 19w at maximum). Hope to hear back from support early next week.

I always thought the output was weak, but I guess I am just used to LED fixtures being VERY optimistic with their photometric claims. The saturation controls are awesome and the lights definitely have their place on many sets. I hope I can figure out my output questions on them. If I can get them higher I'd definitely pick up a few more.

(I do corporate shoots, and small scale music video and narrative work)

Exact same thing happened to me, i bought 2 and had issues with the tilt lock and bluetooth range.
I contacted them, and they promptly sent me new hardware to solve the issue.
Great lights, i use them for interview setups all the time paired with an Aputure Space Light.

Output is fine for what I need, but I am looking for a 3rd more powerful LED light. Maybe the 300d by Aputure, or the Razr 300w

 

[Nick Morrison]

Output is fine for what I need, but I am looking for a 3rd more powerful LED light. Maybe the 100d by Aputure, or the Razr 300w

FYI Hive is well aware they need an LED more powerful than the 100-C, look for them to announce a new fixture soon...they are great guys.

 

[Kwan Sheung Chi]

I'm one of the first supporters when they launched the 100-C on Kickstarter. The 100-c is great, but I have the same issue with bluetooth connectivity and tilt lock, didn't aware that they have new hardwares to solve this. I should reach them out, they have been really great in support when I emailed them before. And when I asked them for possibility of a more powerful LED light like 400-c, they told me they are working on something probably a 200-C. It was June 2017 when they told me this, I hope they can get this out soon this year.

 

[Kyle Jones]

Yeah the new plastic vent cover makes the Bluetooth actually work (though I think their app still needs some TLC). The new tilt hardware is so so so amazing compared to the original. Definitely reach out about both asap.

I’ll be bummed if they only do a 200-C. I’d really prefer a 300-C to really be able to fight the sun when needed. I know it must be tough to design it to still be able to accept Profoto accessories. Can’t go see what they announce!

 

[Kwan Sheung Chi]

Yes I will definitely reach out for the new hardwares asap, the 100-c is nearly perfect for a small light except this two flaws in my opinion.

400-C will be perfect that's what I asked them for, but as you said it must be tough to maintain similar form with the 100-C and increase power output. I think I will still get it if it's only a 200-C. I have been holding off from purchasing new lights after they told me they are working on something already. It would be great to control the whole kit with a single app, but yes the app is not perfect yet, I can imagine a lot can be added to it. I know that the app is not developed in house by Hive team, and the delayed update is actually out of their control.

 

[Lee Saxon]

Although, they don't really *have* to make the whole thing a monobloc-style form factor. They just have to get the nose cone and the LED patch itself small enough to fit in a profoto ring. Behind that, the boards and capacitors and whatever could presumably be fat as a cow.

I'm guessing many of the people like myself who would start losing interest at that point couldn't afford a 400-c anyway, so...

 

[Tommaso Alvisi]

any of you guys had problems with color accuracy in the white standard presets? or has it been solved by now? early units had some issues where you needed to play with the rgb balance to get nice TLCI values

 

[Martin Konrad]

If I use them on skin I dial in some pink/magenta (somewhere around 300 on hue) and between 10 and 20% saturation.
Not claiming that to be the perfect white, but its more pleasing on skin.

 

[Kyle Jones]

any of you guys had problems with color accuracy in the white standard presets? or has it been solved by now? early units had some issues where you needed to play with the rgb balance to get nice TLCI values

I was going to summarize, but I thought it would be better to just paste the full response from HIVE:

“I have seen similar handheld meter readings to what you describe and thank you for giving us the chance to respond. We have found that most handheld meters give different readings because CRI is a pretty poor measuring tool. For the Sekonic meters for example if you would like to produce significantly higher CRI numbers you can very quickly, merely by adding about 10%-30% saturation on the light with the Hue set to 280 (Purple) when the color temp is 5600K. Justin's technique also works by adding red and increasing color temp, but for our purposes I wanted to show that you can keep 5600K and still impress the Sekonic meter.

In fact a nifty trick, if you go through the color bar chart on the Sekonic meters and just look for the color that appears to be missing to their sensors and use the lights hue and saturation to "add" more or of it in, you will usually be able to greatly increase your CRI score as well as playing with your color temp. This does not necessarily create the best looking light in our opinion but it will make the meters happy. This unfortunately points to the crudeness of CRI as a measurement and Sekonic's built in CRI calculator but it also shows the power of the Wasp 100-C to correct itself for whatever sensor or light source you are trying to match. Because in the end it really doesn't matter if I think my 5600K looks good and matches daylight, if for your camera in any given moment sees 5950K with 10% saturation in Red is matching the sunlight in your location, you should set your light there.

Also in fairness to Sekonic we test the lights with a variety of cameras, other light meter and color meter manufacturers and find that frankly color sensors and color imaging sensors on the broadcast level just generally don't agree at all, everyone has their own approach and shortcuts to how their sensor sees light. Where this is not the case is very high end spectrometers. To that end I have attached the independent testing done by Light Laboratory which I hope you will find interesting with a host of testing equipment significantly more powerful than what we usually have in house or the Sekonic meters. We should also say that while some lighting manufacturers have tuned their lights to get good results with the most popular hand held meters, we refuse to take that approach. We would rather give you an incredibly high quality spectrum that is almost infinitely tunable to what you want to match, be it a camera sensor, natural daylight, or a bad office fluorescent. We realize this will cause some confusion and difficulty in the short term, but we truly believe it is the best path forward as people start to understand the limitations of CRI and handheld meters.

But based on similar questions from other customers we went ahead and reevaluated our light settings to specifically address these findings. To to do this we used an integrating sphere and put both the Sekonic and Asensetek hand held meters inside with our very high end Ocean Optics Spectrometer. Here are the results of these tests that I sent to Justin below after he sent me this video himself:

The two questions we wanted to answer were 1) Why is the CCT measurements so far off at 5600K 2) Why was the CRI measuring dramatically lower?

CCT:

I will start with CCT. We found that upon measuring both Sekonic and Asensetek that the pocket meters had a pretty clear offset to read spectral output as warmer than the ocean optics spectrometer read the the Wasp 100-C "white" light output. In fact it was incredibly consistent, to the point we were able to make a relatively simple formula that would accurately predict the reading of the pocket spectrometer based on our settings when it was measuring inside our integrating sphere. This is important because it means neither the Wasp 100-C nor the meter were randomly malfunctioning at specific color temps, the distance between our settings and the pocket spectrometer's readings grew in a consistent and linear fashion as the light went up in color temperature.

The formula is as follows, when the Wasp 100-C is set to 5600K and the Ocean Optics spectrometer is reading 5600K the pocket spectrometer will read 5288K.

The formula for how you get can predict this is as follows:
[CTa - Color Temp set on light, CTb - Color Temp read on hand held meter ]

(CTa x .9) + 248 = CTb

For example

3200 x .9 + 248 = 3128K

Which is exactly what you measured with your meter.

or for example

5600 x .9 + 248 = 5288K

Two things to notice here first, the difference will keep increasing as the color temperature goes up meaning by the time you reach 8000K the meter will perceive an even more extreme difference in measured CCT from assigned CCT. This difference did not appear in the ocean optics spectrometer, which we believe means that this is a manifestation of the Sekonic and Asensetek meters not something happening in the LED's output.

Having said that at any given color temperature the light has an average acceptable range of +/- 100K. This means that if the light is set to 5600K but the ocean optics reads 5501K we would consider that performing within spec. And this plus minus range tends to be more prevalent the higher the color temp. Or in practical terms more of the lights we ship will be read exactly 3200K at 3200K and 7900 at 8000K then will read 3300K at 3200K and 8000K at 8000K. This would not make much practical difference in theory, but because the meter is more off the higher the color temp this acceptable range can make CCT offsets that much more pronounced.

For example if you set your light to 8000K but it was really producing 7900K the formula would read:

7900 x .9 + 248 = 7358K (almost 700K off your setting)

Now the question becomes why were you able to see an additional 500K of CCT difference. This is where measurements inside an integrating sphere vs. outside of one come into play. Integrating spheres are really the only way to completely prevent any stray light influence. Stray light including bounced light off of surfaces can play havoc on a spectrometer. Now most pocket spectrometers are designed to take into consideration some stray light (this may be part of what is going on with the offset we are seeing) and secondly as you get higher and higher in color temperature the warmer the stray light will be comparatively. Most interiors have an average color temperature in the 4000K range between all the mixed light sources. Also most surfaces are generally warming in their reflectance of light including the majority of white and grey paint.

[...contributed on next post...]

 

[Kyle Jones]

CRI:

So there are a lot of arguments against CRI as a useful tool for telling the performance of a light source on camera, but for the purposes here I won't dwell too much on that argument. What I will emphasize is the most important question I believe is not the CRI, TLCI etc. the most important thing is the performance of the light in relation to a camera sensor.

We proceeded to test CRI levels in the integrating sphere with the 3200K - 5600K we found a range of CRI ratings from 92 - 98CRI without changing any of the saturation settings and had plus 90 throughout the white light range. So we wanted to get to the bottom of why our spectrometer and the one being used by Light Lab the independent testing laboratory were both finding very good, very high CRI results and we kept getting mediocre results with the pocket spectrometers unless we added saturation. When we started looking at the spectral graphs being measured by both meters we found some clear differences.

The short summary is that for whatever reason the pocket meters were just not registering as much of the blue and red as the light was producing. I have attached the chart for 5600K and you will see two spectrum graphs on top of each other. Both were measuring the same output from the same Wasp 100-Cset to 5600K in the same integrating sphere, but as you can clearly see portions of the spectrum are not registering with the Handheld meters. Primarily the handheld meters are at leas partial missing the output of 2 of 5 LED chips that make up blend of LEDs, the Amber and Sapphire chips. These chips would be producing the majority of the Orange, Blue and Violet light missing from the spectrum chart you see there. This would also explain why R9 and R12 appeared so low on your Sekonic meter, it is not registering this output.

Why this is happening is unfortunately pure speculation on our part, but one of our hunches is that to save design time and processing power the handheld meters are cheating a little bit. They are sampling portions of the spectrum and then filling in the rest (a little like certain camera chips) and because the spectrometer was designed expecting three chip (RGB) and fixed white light COBs the spectral output is more easily predicted with less information. Because we are creating a broader spectrum by using more unique portions the algorithms in the meter are failing to fully measure the spectral output. Also since the handheld meters are trying to control for a certain amount of stray and spill light they may try to make predictive averages based on known spectral outputs of "white" light LEDs and traditional sources and limiting readings from nanometers that don't line up with that.

To test this a little further we re-created your experiment of adding saturation, instead of adding red, we instead added "purple" or more specifically between 260 and 280 degree on the Hue wheel and we found that we go the Sekonic meter to respond in a very similar way suddenly producing high CRIs without changing the color temperature.

Finally we then proceeded to tested this with multiple cameras (Red, Canon, Sony and Arri models) all of the cameras found the unsaturated white lights to be an acceptable neutral white and corresponding color temps. Skin tones rendered properly on the vectorscope and neutral grey cards were even on RGB split waveform monitors. But most importantly while we could improve all the scope readings for all the cameras with small tweaks to the saturation the improvements were not 100% consistent in their corrections across the cameras, nor were they always consistently more pleasing to the eye.

Conclusions:

Our final conclusion after all of this is that there is not a superior preset to our current base settings that would produce across the board better performance on all cameras or to all settings. We will of course keep developing and improving our color science however and whenever we can. But we created this product with the belief that there really is no such thing as "white" light. There is full spectrum light and limited spectrum light and all full spectrum light can be tweaked to emphasize the part of the spectrum that best renders colors for the task at hand. While we call it "white" light there is always a color cast and we believe we have created a tool that gives you the greatest possible control over what the emphasis of that full spectrum light is for the camera, the subject and the location you are in, none of which can be described unfortunately with something as simple as a score out of 100.

————————————————

In the end, I honestly do think they look great and accurate. If they can streamline the app experience, I’ll literally have no complaints. Incredible tool for the size.

 

[Nick Morrison]

BTW we use/control our Hive 100-C's via Luminair, which works GREAT.

And yes they mentioned the 200-C to us as well.

What else they have up their sleeve...I'm not sure!