dears
I’m a photographer and looking forward to buy two led flashlights for light-painting , the criteria suit my flashlights is to be neutral (tint free, not warm not cool) to preserve detail and not washing colors, i have no any experience with LED flash light , that why i need your advice and direction, i have ordered a Xenon flashlight because i read that it is neutral and mimic daylight closely but i still need a led flash for its known advantages over xenon bulb , other requirements are
- first flash with medium power (around 200 lumen) , second one with high power (around 800 lumen)
- preferably uses AA or AAA batteries
- preferably with focus adjustable bean
- multiple powers (high, mid, low) , no need for SOS or bacon
- high quality
budget is not an issue
as i mention before the most important one is the color temp of the flash
may be a flashlight with these specifications even does not exist so please excuse my ignorance , i need your kind help
I’d recommend a light with a Nichia 219 LED. I’m not too familiar with lights that do have the LED, but it’s hailed for great CRI and has the closest color reproduction compared to sunlight or an incandescent light. It’ll easily give out 200 lumens, probably more around 350-450 when driven properly.
For the 800 lumen light, anything with a Cree warm white or even neutral white would work well. Make sure you it has around the same kelvin temperature so that it doesn’t have different colors from the flash.
The Trustfire Z8 is of a decent quality zoomable light, although I’m not sure it takes AA; it does work with 14500 li-ion though.
Unfortunately it’s cool white, so it might look bluish when you’re using the flash.
What is light painting?
Which budget do you have?
A lot of flashlights use rechargeable liion batteries for example 18650 cells are very common, so you will need a charger and batteries too.
Would that be an option for you?
Unless you are using a flash in combination with them. Color of the flashlight is irrelevent. White balance can be adjusted for that. If you combine with flash, filters on the flash can be used to get the desired color.
What is relevant is how high CRI the light have (Color Rating Index). The higher the CRI, the better the color rendition will be. I would rate them as.
65 CRI - not good
70 CRI- Could be acceptable
75 CRI- Useable
80 CRI typical - Good
80 CRI minimum - Marginally better than good
92 CRI - Very good
Getting 800 lumen with high CRI out of a typical zoom light would not be easy. Especially if AA batteries are in the picture.
Using a 80-CRI Warm white XM-L emitter mounted on copper would give you very high output though and also good CRI. There are also some 4000K NW XM-L2 emitters with 80-CRI that quite recently became easily available.
There are some options for the high-cri 200 lumen light. But in order two get most of the requirements, you would have to go for custom made lights as far as I can see. Especially if you want the Kelvin on both lights to match, which can be useful depending on your needs.
Send me a message if a set of any good production lights does not come up in this thread that would suit your needs. I may be able to help you out since I have a few candidates that I could customize to your needs.
It would be cheaper to buy lights with low cost shipping from China and such though. So give this thread a week first , just to see if any nice options should come up.