TTArtisan’s new mini RGB LED light looks just like a film canister

This is both a very strange but also perhaps useful one from TTArtisan. It’s a small RGB LED light that’s the same shape and size as a regular 35mm film canister. It might not seem all that useful at first. In fact, it looks quite silly, but it is potentially quite practical.

Much of the marketing shows these lights sitting on top of a camera. Almost nobody is ever going to use one of these on top of their camera. But for throwing a little colour in small sets for product photography or toy photography? Maybe.

TTArtisan Mini RGB LED – Ridiculous or genius?

On-camera lights are typically used to provide a little fill light to stop shadows going to black. This usually means white of some white balance variety or another. It almost never means RGB. TTArtisan actually released a white version of this a couple of months ago for that use case.

Still, a light this small, as cute as it looks, isn’t going to put out a massive amount of light. So it’s only going to perform well in certain circumstances for that kind of role. An RGB light in that role? I don’t know, but to me, it seems pretty useless.

But the film canister form factor is pretty interesting and potentially still quite useful. If you work closely with your subjects for things like product photography, toy photography, or even macro photography, these might just be what you need to add a splash of colour.

They do seem to be quite limited, though. While it does combine red, green, and blue LEDs for the complete colour spectrum, choosing a colour isn’t so straightforward. It looks like we simply long-press a button to cycle through the hue, and we stop when we’re where we need to be.

There’s no app control, either. So, syncing multiple units together with identical colours, or even a preset range of colours may be impossible. You can get close, by eye, but matching them all perfectly? Probably not. Still, in times where the actual colour isn’t that critical, quite handy.

They’re cheap, too, and TTartisan is even selling them in packs of up to 10. So, they obviously understand the versatility of having a bunch of these, and buying in big multipacks knocks up to about 20% off the cost.

Price and Availability

The TTArtisan Mini RGB LED Light Film Canister is available to buy now for $10.90 each. A pack comprised of 10 units is also available to buy now for $89, dropping the per-unit price down to $8.90. Other packs of 3, 5 or 7 units are also available.

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