By site editor Dan Chung:
SMPTE 2013: Bowen LED ring light from Dan Chung on Vimeo.
Bowens flash lighting has been used and trusted by photographers around the world for decades. More recently they have made a move into continuous lighting for video. Clinton Harn caught up with the company at the SMPTE show in Sydney last week to see what they have to offer.
They were showcasing two new products – the Solo wide aspect LED camera light and a new ringlight with a large hole in the middle to allow mounting on larger lenses.
SMPTE 2013: Bowens SOLO LED light from Dan Chung on Vimeo.
The colour accuracy of the light from LEDs has been under the microscope lately with tests showing that certain LEDs exhibit a pronounced green cast which can be hard or impossible to compensate for and tends to give rather unappealing skin tones. The industry measure of colour accuracy is CRI (although that is not the whole story). At NAB this year various high-end manufacturers were claiming that their lights offered very natural colour reproduction with CRIs as high as 95 – to prove their point many of the stands had cameras pointed at colourful test subjects that reproduced well.
In Clinton’s video the Bowens representative claims the Solo gets “the best CRI that there currently is available” with the type of LEDs they use. He then goes on to say it is around the 82 mark – which seems a little on the low side. I hope this is something that Bowens can clarify.
