If you’ve shot video, or even sometimes if you’ve shot stills, you know what a hassle practical lighting can be. It’s always too bright or too dim to easily balance with the rest of your lights for the ISO you want to shoot at. Or, it’s completely the wrong colour. So, you have to get tricky with white balance, or gel things, or have a bunch of different types of bulbs on-hand to match to other light sources.
Well, no more. Now you just need one type of bulb to match with everything. Aputure has finally launched the Accent B7c, an RGBWW colour-mixing practical LED light that lets you simulate just about any colour or brightness you’ll ever need.
It was first shown off at NAB last year, and it’s taken a while to get to release, but Aputure’s made a number of changes since its initial trip out into the wild. For a start, it now has a name. Initially, it was called the Accent B5c and was 5W. Now, it’s been bumped up to 7W (that’s another change), so the name has followed suit, becoming the Accent B7c.
This new version of the light also uses the same RGBWW chipset as Aputure’s recently released Nova P300C RGBWW LED panel, which is a massive upgrade over their original prototype. This allows it to offer a massive colour temperature range of 2,000K all the way up to 10,000K and offer 90% of the Rec.2020 colour space through its RGB components.
It also has a new heatsink to help keep it running cool, and it will now allow you to run at full power on batteries. Oh yes, it has an internal battery (as you can probably tell from the above image, so it doesn’t even need to be screwed into a live socket. It also has on-board brightness and colour temperature control, in addition to remote control using the iOS and Android smartphone apps.
The light is aimed at any filmmaker who needs to be able to wirelessly control and colour mix practical lights within their scene. Then you can match them up to other light sources in exactly the way you need to. Looking at the product photos, it appears that they’re all screw-mount bulbs. There’s been no word on whether or not there’ll be a bayonet mount for the UK and other countries which primarily use bayonet mount light fixtures. We’ve reached out to Aputure to find out and will let you know if we hear back from them.
Update: It is only available in screw mount, but bayonet-to-screw mount adapters are easy enough to obtain for those that need them.
The Accent B7c is available to pre-order now for $70 individually and will be shipping very soon. There is also the Accent B7c 8-light charging kit for those with larger practical lighting needs, priced at a cool $699. No shipping date has been finalised yet for the 8-light charging kit, although they say to expect it in early 2021.
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