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The tiny light that can; an INSSTRO C1 RGB LED review

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Light – the most important thing in photography.  Without it, we have nothing but darkness.  Some of us like to capture and bend the natural light to our needs. While others love to craft a scene with artificial lights.

If you love adding in your own light then its a nice time to be a photographer.  Lights are getting smaller, more complex and often include their own power.   Freeing us from wires and bringing more creative freedom.

My second RGB capable LED was the INSSTRO C1, and this is what I’ll talk about today.

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Cheap LED Lights: What is CRI and does it matter

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As a long time reader of the blog, you probably already know that not all LED are made equal. One of the prime parameter indicating the quality of light that an LED panel gives out is its CRI (Color Rendering Index) rating. The higher the CRI, the more colors that light is able to render, giving a more precise image for the camera to capture.

If you heard about the green tint or the purple hue LED horror stories, those are both a result (or the cause) for a low CRI rating.

The folks at Videomaker put a colorful object under 4 types of light: tungsten (very close to CRI of 100), and three LED lights: a 77 CRI light, a 99 CRI light and a light with a unknown CRI (which probably means very low) and compared the results.

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Not All LED Panels Are Made Equal. Here’s How To Tell The Difference

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Today I want to talk about LEDs and CRI. You see not all LEDs were created equal. Most of the time when we talk about LEDs we talk brightness and color temperature, and that makes sense as those are easily measured and have great impact on our photos.

One thing that we often overlook is CRI. And what is CRI you ask? Well CRI stands for Color rendering index and it the number that has the bigger impact on the quality of light.

Let me explain.

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