Godox has announced a new range of underwater LED lights. Named Godox Dive, there are two product ranges, one daylight and one RGBWW, each available in three sizes at 25cm, 40cm and 60cm in length. The WTD daylight models have a white balance of 5,600 Kelvin (+/- 300K), and the WTR RGBWW LED lights have a wide white balance range of 1,800K up to 10,000K – as well as the full complement of red, green and blue hues.
The lights are rated for underwater use up to a depth of 40 metres (131 feet), with easy-to-see fluorescent buttons to be easily seen and used in the depths when smartphone control obviously isn’t possible. They also provide a wide range of lighting effects – you know, for when you need those underwater fireworks and police chases.
The WT25D, WT40D and WT60D daylight LEDs offer underwater battery life of an hour, an hour and twenty minutes and two hours, respectively. When you come out onto dry land, that battery life gets bumped up to two hours and twenty minutes, five hours and thirty minutes and six hours, respectively. This is likely due to the changing output. Underwater, the 25, 40 and 60 daylight models offer 24W, 54W and 70W of output respectively. When out of water, this drops to 10W, 13W and 21W. A pretty significant drop, but with the water acting as a heatsink, it’s not surprising they can run at higher power (and drain the battery more quickly) underwater.
The Dive Daylight models offer a 5,600 Kelvin temperature output, with a variance of 300K on either side of that. They have both a CRI and TLCI of 96, so when you’re above water, you’re going to get fantastic colour. Underwater, you’ll get as good a colour as the water itself – and anything in it that might be filtering the light – will let you.
Above water, you get smartphone control via the Godox app over Bluetooth. Underwater, fluorescent buttons allow you to easily see all of your functions. They also let you control and configure the app when smartphone control isn’t exactly the most convenient thing to do.
The RGBWW variants, the WT25R, WT40R and WT60R, are identical in form factor to their daylight variants but do differ in some important features. They offer a wide colour temperature range from 1,800K to 10,000K as well as full RGB hue and saturation control. They have a slightly different output to the daylight versions, too, at 20W, 55W, and 77W when underwater for the 25R, 40R and 60R models, respectively. On dry land, this, too, dips down to 7W, 15W and 14W.
The battery life of the RGBWW models is similar to those of the daylight lights when used underwater, with times of an hour, an hour and thirty minutes and two hours. Above water, you get three hours, five hours and forty-five minutes, and ten hours, respectively, for the 25R, 40R and 60R. The weight, too, is very slightly different, although there isn’t much between the daylight and RGBWW versions, with lights weighing from 0.64kg up to 1.9kg depending on the size.
While the overall light output might be down with the RGBWW version, they offer significant advantages when it comes to the built-in lighting effects. In contrast to the daylight version’s 13 lighting effects, the RGBWW version of each size gets 37 different lighting effects. This provides a wide range of creative possibilities.
It’s an interesting-looking set of lights from Godox in a space that so far seems to have been largely neglected by lighting manufacturers. While there are a number of LED lights out there for video that can survive a bit of light rain or even a potential downpour, very few can be fully submerged for any length of time. It’ll be interesting to see what creative uses photographers and filmmakers put these in over the coming weeks as they start to get into people’s hands.
The Godox WT25D, WT40D, and WT60D are available to pre-order now for $159, $239 and $359, respectively. The Godox WT25R, WT40R and WT60R are also available to pre-order now for $199, $299 and $439, respectively.
Where would you use these? In the pool or in the ocean?
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