Velvet Light 2 / Kino Celeb 450 LED

Bored, bored, bored, will someone please sell us something that’s not an LED panel please, yes, they are all very nice and yes, the Velvet 2 and the Kino Celeb 450 are both great quality examples but they are both still LED panels and I’m getting fed up with them. I mean could someone not just make a triangular one or one that does something different like accept apple TV for lunch time entertainment. We have fat ones, skinny ones, flexible ones, big ones, little ones, tiny ones, hexagonal ones, square ones, oblong ones even spider shaped ones they all dim pretty much from 100 to 0% all have decent CRI ratings in the 90’s, all run on very little power, all run silently, all can be bi colour and so on boring, BORING!

Ever woken up on the wrong side of the bed?

Sorry I think I got out of the wrong side of the bed today and I don’t want to be unfair to either of these two very nice pieces of kit but I’m sure you like me are a little over the whole LED panel thing, I recall the first few to hit the industry and how we were all excited about the cool running, colour variable, dimmable, softness of sexy light they gave us and boy how we have enjoyed having them. The LED panel is now industry standard and crops up on almost every job, I’ve even taken one camping for goodness sake. (it worked pretty well)

So, Velvet, I did learn something today, apparently when you make velvet the machine makes 2 sheets of fabric face to face and then a huge knife slices the two sheets apart, a bit like making a toasted cheese sandwich and then splitting it into two bits of cheese on toast afterwards, very clever and potentially dangerous and apparently that’s why velvet costs so much.

Celeb, sorry I couldn’t find much to amuse me about a celeb, the word was first used in 1907 presumably back when being a celeb meant something, amusingly the Merriam-Webster online dictionary uses the following as an example of use, “Gigi isn’t the only celeb whose belly button has been the subject of mysteries over the years.” Really? what other umbilicus related enigmas have I missed.

Stop it Bruce this is meant to be an informative yet amusing blog about two very nice and very expensive LED panels but its descending into a rant.

For a moment I’m going to try and take this seriously (well as seriously as I ever do).

The Velvet 2 Led Panel has arrived here at Pixipixel and despite my opening comments we are very glad to have them, the original Velvet light has proved to be a good investment, they are popular with you guys and haven’t caused us any grief at all, in fact we seldom have any left if that’s an indication of anything. The Velvet 2 is needless to say an improvement on its older brother, Full IP54 weatherproofing makes it England proof for when it’s cats and dogs in July and a rugged impact resistant body makes it driver proof for deliveries.

White light from 2700 k – 6500 k in 100 k steps or a quick shift button toggles between 5600 k and 3200 k for ease. Its thin, portable and easy to rig with many options including multiple sliding ¼ “ rigging points on the top and bottom (that’s a fresh idea), silent fan free running and its DMX equipped. But the most important thing is the light it produces, as with the Velvet 1 the light is beautifully soft and even with a wraparound feel, perfect for Interviews and the like. With the addition of a battery plate it can be run off any V lock battery from 24 -35 v. Its remarkably efficient too delivering 459 lux / 42 fc at 3 m (10ft) but only draws 159 w. So, it’s a rather nice LED panel (even if a little boring)

And onto the Kino Celeb 450, again all joking aside it’s a great light. It’s a little larger than many other panels at 45” x 14” (114.5 x 36cm) so it’s almost the same size as a 4 ft 4 bank. Producing the trademark soft, board, wraparound light we have come to expect from the Celeb range. DMX in and out and ports and Lumin Radio wireless DMX control are standard again as we would expect with a Celeb. Other than its size the stand out features are in its menu options. The white, menu includes magenta / green controls, kelvin (2700 k – 6500 k) and dimming from 100 to 0.02 %.  A gels / hue option extends the kelvin range to 2500 – 9900K and features over 100 pre-sets of the most popular lighting gels.

Finally, an RGB menu allows for individual control over red, green and blue LED’s to give over 2 million possible colour combinations, What? 2 million colours when I went to school, we only had seven colours, remember Richard of York gave battle in vein that was what I learnt back in the day (a bit like figjam or snafu it was a useful acronym) my Caran D’ache pencils didn’t even come with that many colours. Mind you I think my teachers lied to me anyway we seem to have lost a planet since I left school too (how careless)

So, to sum up we have more panels than a suspended ceiling and they are about as interesting, each is getting a BCR of 5/10 just because I’m fed up with LED panels so don’t consider them “cool” anymore, if I was to give a rating on quality, usefulness, even light quality then they would both be 10 /10 but where is the humour in that eh. It just goes to show that you don’t need to be exciting or cool to be good, now I hope that’s a message we can all take away from this blog especially my family if they are reading it lol.

Cheers all and I promise to be more excited about the next blog (provided it’s not a blinking LED panel that is)