At NAB 2025 in Las Vegas, Kelvin was showing its upcoming Play Hero RGBACL LED Pocket Creative Panel Light is the latest product from the Norwegian lighting company.
The Kelvin Play Hero is a new version of the Play Pro. It is claimed to be 5x brighter and features an entirely new LED design and a narrower beam angle. All the same accessories, except the honeycomb grid, will work with the new fixture.
The Play Hero, just like the Play Pro, is a professional entry-level fixture that utilizes a similar light engine as the ones that power Epos 300 and Epos 600 fixtures. It has the same size and form factor as the original.
The whole ethos behind Kelvin’s range is to make lights that all match and integrate seamlessly together. In a lot of ways, the Play Hero was designed as an entry-level professional fixture to get you into Kelvin’s range.
Cantastoria 6-channel RGBACL light engine
The light features Kelvin’s sophisticated 6-channel RGBACL light engine Cantastoria, which produces a full spectrum of colors within the 1,700 – 20,000K range. The Cantastoria Engine utilizes Red, Green, Blue, Amber, Cyan and Lime. This is a similar light engine that is found in Kelvin’s flagship products.
The Play Hero doesn’t use any white LEDs, instead, it mixes all of those different color LEDs to produce white light. Hive Lighting has also been using 7 LED-chip blending. Instead of the traditional 3 colors, Hive uses red, amber, lime, cyan, green, blue, and sapphire. The advantage RGBACL has over RGBWW is that it is capable of giving you a larger CCT range and it can produce more saturated colors with more output. RGBWW lights tend to struggle to create saturated colors like yellow and they don’t always have as much output when generating saturated colors. They can also have a large drop-off in output at different CCT settings.
Whatever Kelvin has been doing, they are doing it right. The Kelvin Epos fixtures are some of the most color-accurate lights I have ever tested.
Price & Availability
The Kelvin Play Hero will be available in August for 299 Euros.
