Camlight, unique design in one area but too much plastic and old tech questions quality.
Camlight makes a variety of panels from small on-camera units to large 750 LED units. For most of their offerings there isn’t anything too exciting to report except for the fact that many are made entirely of cheap crappy ABS plastic, even the mounting spigots are plastic. I feel quality here is a real issue and these plastic units should be avoided. They even have a printed warning not to use them if the temp gets to high! Now don’t get me wrong, sometimes plastic is a dream material but not this plastic.
The standard LED panels are housed in stamped steel fixtures with the usual rotary dimmer, V or AB battery option and DMX control. One complaint about the DMX is that it is via RJ45 connectors not the industry standard 3 or 5 pin XLR. Now in a studio install RJ45 probably is fine but I haven’t seen too many Grip Trucks with big loops of RJ45 just waiting to control some lights, never mind terminating to a controller. The DMX is also only addressable via local DIP switches, old school and annoying.
Without wasting more time on the usual C-C-P designs let’s look at their unique focusable LED fixture. The Camlight SL-9900 is an octagon shaped unit with nine articulating LED panels and these nine panels are very bright. The panels are controlled via a manual gear knob on the back that basically pulls the centre panel in and out to alter the angle of the surrounding panels which I surmise are on a pivot hinge arrangement. This movement created the flood or spot option on this unit. Unlike other focusable LED fixtures where the LEDs have different lensing to alter their focus this unit has all spot LEDs and disperses their beam to achieve a flood effect. Here’s the rub on this technique though, the beam field is way uneven in flood mode and way hot spot in spot mode. The flood mode showed bands of light on the show floor about 6 feet away and the spot mode was a small 1 foot hot spot with rings at the same distance. Even their product photos show an uneven flood field. To add to the issue this fixture was all plastic, with a mechanical movement required for focussing I would worry about how long it will last before the gears fall out. The SL-9900 had two large high speed fans mounted in the back panel to cool the LEDs and from the airflow I felt coming out of the unit I think that quiet is not one of this lights features.
Overall I didn’t like any of their lights; the plastic fantastic killed any idea of quality in my mind. The focusing light seemed more gimmicky than useful and used loud fans, non-standard DMX and old school DIP addressing.
Here’s the numbers:
SL-2500 5600k 180fc@1m $500.00
SL-3300 Bi-colour 440fc@1m (all LEDs on) $1100.00
SL-7500 5600k 830fc@1m $1100.00
SL-9900 5600k flood 900fc@1m spot 1500fc@1m $2000.00
