We bought a pair of Flolight panel lights about 6 months ago and I thought I’d wait a bit and see how they held up over half a year span. The lights we purchased are daylight balanced with an anton bauer battery adaptor on the back. We’ve taken these lights all the way from red carpets to the middle of the desert and the ease of use and versatility have made us believers in this type of lighting. For ENG, run and gun type productions, to be able to set up quick, toss on a battery and have 1000w of light without the hassel of cords was a life saver in many situations. Top lights sometimes don’t cut it. We do plenty of quick shoots and I find myself packing a flolight more often then not.
There are a few problems I’ve found that should be shared. First off, all are lights come in balanced between 6000k and 6300k, not 5600k as advertised. The lights aren’t built tough, meaning in the 6 month time period we’ve had them in for flicking, dimmer malfunction and one went toast and stop firing all together. The build quality isn’t up to what I would consider production standard. The light can also be a little harsh so a couple pieces of diffusion are necessary if doing any sort of interview which drastically cuts the throw of the light. And, even though we have the gel adaptors, adding gels or diffusion isn’t an easy endeavor. However, when we ‘separately’ purchase the barndoors that problem should be solved.
The most common question I’m asked is how do the Flolights compare to the LitePanels. We rented a couple of LitePanels for a shoot and while we had them we decided to do a few tests for comparison. The Flolights, despite being 6300k, had a more realistic daylight apperance then the LitePanels which didn’t even make it to 5600k but closer to 5000k. They were almost twice as bright as the LitePanels and lit our subjects at much further distances. The LitePanels did appear to be studier and have a better build and a few more features like the dual color temps. Oh and the one Flolight costs about 1/3 the price of a LitePanel.
I’m not going to use them for everything but these lights do have a place in my packages and I will continue to use Flolights until I see another panel light that can give me the same value. And though they tend to have a few more malfunctions than I’d like, returning the poor units and customer service has been very good to this point.
The f-stops here.