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We’re not saying the Westcott FJ400 and Jinbei HD-400 are the same strobe, but they sure look similar

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I’ve seen a few posts recently about Westcott’s new FJ400 strobe, with a couple of sites labeling it the “best value strobe” on the market. We even covered the announcement here on DIYP and it looks fairly impressive, holding up to competitors like the Godox AD400Pro quite well in many respects.

But is it really Westcott’s new strobe? Or is it Jinbei’s HD400, released over a year ago, just with “Westcott” stamped on it? WE are not saying that it is, but we are saying that there are some striking similarities.

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Westcott announces FJ400, portable but powerful strobe and FJ-X2m, universal wireless trigger

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Westcott has just announced a new strobe and an accompanying wireless trigger. The Westcott FJ400 is a portable 400Ws AC/DC strobe with less than 1 s recycle time at full power. It’s launched along with the FJ-X2m is a universal trigger which pairs with virtually any camera brand, so you don’t need a brand-specific trigger.

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Westcott’s new Flex Cine lights add full RGB colour to their flexible LED lighting range

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Westcott has today announced a new Flex Cine lighting system. Carrying on from the popular Flex system launched in 2014, the new Flex Cine line gets full RGBW capability. Westcott says they haven’t just added RGB LEDs to their old lights, though. They’ve redesigned them from the ground up. There’s also a wireless DMX Dimmer.

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Johnsons Photopia – UK distributor for Sekonic, Blackrapid, PocketWizard, Peli and more enters administration

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Johnsons Photopia have announced through their website and Twitter that they have now gone into administration. There isn’t a lot of information yet about how this came about, or how this may affect staff and future customer support for the brands they represent.

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Westcott’s new portable LED makes using modifiers easy

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The development of LED lights over the last couple of years has been quite interesting to follow. 10 years ago, LEDs were the last type of light I’d use for any kind of serious video work, but since then they’ve come a very long way. They’ve become more consistent and colour accurate with high CRI & TLCI, more powerful, and more versatile.

Westcott’s new Solix LED light, though, has a particularly unique feature. An integrated speedring for connecting directly into softboxes. It’s an interesting design that allows the light to keep a small form factor while still offering the use of modifiers.

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Introducing Omega Reflector 360 – the world’s first 15-in-1 reflector

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If you are searching for one reflector to rule them all, this may be the one. Westcott has introduced the new Omega Reflector 360, which can be used in a number of situations. You can use it as a traditional or a shoot-through reflector, with natural or strobe light, and with four different covers and a diffuser. When you only have a single light source, this reflector can really come in handy.

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This deep 24″ collapsible beauty dish folds down to just 6″

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Designed by portrait photographer Joel Grimes, the new 24″ Rapid Box Beauty Dish from Westcott seems to tick all of the boxes when it comes to location photography.  It’s small, lightweight, and can also double up as a regular 24″ round softbox by adding the diffuser panel on the front.

Having lightweight and portable kit is important when you’re working on location, especially if you don’t have assistants or other crew with you to help you lug it around.  In this video from Joel & Westcott, we’re going to see how this one works and how it can be used on location.

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The Westcott Eyelighter Will Give Wonderful Eyes. In Camera

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One of the holy grails of beauty retouching is perfect eyes. Actually, getting good lighting on the eyes would probably be one of the first things you would lean in a beauty retouching workshop, maybe after perfecting skin. One of the “secrets” to getting good light on the eyes is getting a slight moon-shaped highlight on the bottom of the eye. Dave Piper covered that a while back on his eye’s retouching tutorial, but what if you wanted to get this in camera?

I just stumbled upon this great lighting modifier over at Neil van Niekerk’s Tangents blog. It is called the The Eyelighter and only does one thing, but it does it well: It provides a light that gives an arched reflection in the eye.

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Hey Westcott, Here’s a Great Way To Tilt The Apollo

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The Westcott Apollo is one of my favorite light modifiers. You’ve seen it featured a ton of times on DIYP. It’s one of the more bought items on the Gear Guide, and we like it so much that we even gave one away a while back.

If you wanna see it in action, check out how Benjamin Von Wong pushed it to the edge with fireworks (or a more traditional shoot by Zack Arias).

Anyhow, the unique softbox-like light with the umbrella ease and strobe-friendliness makes it a great tool to have in your on location lighting box (or bass case).

There is only one small thing which is not perfect about the Apollos, they don’t tilt. Really. If you are shooting with an Apollo on a light stand, you are pretty much limited to having the box point forward or sideways. It is not trivial to have it look 45 degrees down.

Basically, the Apollo gives you two options: Great light, with the strobe very close to the back screen, and almost no tilt. OR, you move the strobe closer to the shaft base (the zipper on the bottom of the Apollo allows this) to tilt, but then you risk hot spots.[Read More…]

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