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Maxima 3 LED spot announced – Maxima 7 sunlight simulator LED spot finally available to buy

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This one’s taken a while. Initially announced in February 2020 to much fanfare, the Maxima 7 LED spotlight is now available to buy. And it’s brought a little one with it, the Maxima 3. All the specs of the Maxima 7 were previously released at launch, and you can see those here, so let’s talk about the new Maxima 3.

The Maxima 3 is a 300W COB LED light with a CRI of 96+ and a TLCI of 97. It’s available in two versions that are either tungsten or daylight balanced, with a COB LED life of 50,000 hours. As with the Maxima 7, the Maxima 3 LED contains a focusable 8″ Fresnel lens and accepts Bowens mount modifiers.

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Litepanels has announced a brighter Lykos+ bicolour LED panel

Litepanels has today announced their new Lykos+ Mini LED panel. They describe it as a broadcast-quality bicolour light with 40% more light output than the previous generation, claiming over 2,000 lux (@3ft) of accurate white light at any colour temp from 3200K up to 5600K. It incorporates the lensing tech from its larger 1×1 Astra siblings, with a CRI of 96, but weighing a mere 1lb.

If the weight and the “Mini LED” descriptor hadn’t given it away, it’s a small and compact light, designed for use in remote locations or in tight spaces. They say it offers up to two hours of operation off a Sony NP-F style battery (presumably an NP-F970), and comes either on its own or in a kit including three lights, stands, filters, softboxes and Pelican case.

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Spiffy Gear launches their second-generation KYU-6 wearable cine-light

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The popular wearable Lumiee LED lights have received an upgrade. Spiffy Gear has today announced its successor, the KYU-6. Like the original Lumiee, it comes in 95+ CRI bi-colour and clean wavelength RGB flavours, but KYU-6 comes with finer brightness settings, better weather resistance, and you can now charge it while using it.

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The BIGSOFTI is yet another small LED light to help you shoot better smartphone photos

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Small lights just seem to be popping up more and more lately. We’ve got Lumiee, Litra, Lumecube and a whole bunch of others beginning with “L”, not to mention all the cheap small lights that double as USB power banks over the last year or so. But now we have another one. The BIGSOFTI which, despite its name, isn’t that big at all.

It’s a small light, much like a lot of the others that are on the market, but it comes with a bunch of accessories that let you mount it to a bunch of different devices from your phone or laptop, to a camera’s hotshoe or a 1/4-20″ mount. It’s currently up on Kickstarter, with pledges starting at around $60, but it’s already beaten its goal more than six times over.

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The Maxima 7 flicker-free LED light is a 1200 PAR HMI equivalent with 700 Watts of power

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LED lighting technology has come very far over the last decade. It’s replaced the more traditional incandescent “hot lights” we used to see in video, movie and photography studios. The Maxima 7 is a new 5600K Chip-on-board (COB) LED light that’s the equivalent of a 1.2K HMI that lets you pretty much recreate the sun on your set.

It’s being developed by a company in Italy, and while there are other 1.2K equivalent LED lights out there on the market, this one wants to separate itself by form factor, light output and versatility. It even has a Bowens mount to let you use softboxes and other modifiers.

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Lightcore is a 5800 lumen LED light for video that’s smaller than a speedlight

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The problem for many photographers making the move to video is that there’s generally a lot more gear, and most of it’s much bigger than the gear they’ve been using for photography. Especially if they work on location, and particularly when it comes to lighting. Well, Lightcore is here to help fix that. At least the lighting part.

Being funded through Kickstarter, Lightcore is a 5800 lumen LED light that’s smaller than a speedlight, and offers flicker-free operation even at 1% power shooting 120 frames per second. It claims the equivalent combined power of 8 60 Watt tungsten incandescent bulbs, and offers a CRI of 97+.

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4 easy ways to set up great lighting for vlogs and video conferences

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If you want people to take you seriously, whether it’s in a vlog or a simple video conference with a colleague or client, you need to have good lighting. As photographers or filmmakers we’re supposed to know this stuff. So, having bad lighting on ourselves doesn’t really set a great impression.

In this video, Jay P Morgan at The Slanted Lens takes a look at how to easily light for vlogging, or any other time you might want to point a camera at yourself for a quick video. And it doesn’t even have to cost a lot of money – or any at all.

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