I love bargains and this website is all about bargains and getting the most for your money, but sometimes the cheapest indeed means the worst.
In the first edition of my BIG LED LIGHT GUIDE I recommended the china_lighting 520, 1000, 1900 lights, all of the same design. These are sold by other companies too, but all look exactly the same. All of them appeared to offer the best value for money, so I bought the one that I thought gave me the most for my buck, the 1900LED. Unfortunately I turned out to be a big disappointment, even though it’s cheap. I foolishly thought that 1900 will give be almost 4 times more power that a 500LED that I bought before it. Well, the LEDs on 1900 are much smaller that the ones on 500LED, so don’t except crazy power from it. It’s no more that twice as bright. This is nothing really comparing to the other problems with the light.
In the first edition of my BIG LED LIGHT GUIDE I recommended the china_lighting 520, 1000, 1900 lights, all of the same design. These are sold by other companies too, but all look exactly the same. All of them appeared to offer the best value for money, so I bought the one that I thought gave me the most for my buck, the 1900LED. Unfortunately I turned out to be a big disappointment, even though it’s cheap. I foolishly thought that 1900 will give be almost 4 times more power that a 500LED that I bought before it. Well, the LEDs on 1900 are much smaller that the ones on 500LED, so don’t except crazy power from it. It’s no more that twice as bright. This is nothing really comparing to the other problems with the light.
It makes a lot of noise; if you switch the fan on it is even louder (for some reason I thought the fan would be a good idea), in fact it makes this quite bad light even worse and the light actually get’s hot too. I’m currently working on quite a long project and I bought the light for this project. On the first day of filming it turned out that sound recordist could hear the light, even though it was in another end of the room, so I was forced to use it as a fill blasting though the door outside of the room (definitely not a best way to use the light that was suppose to be my key). Basically if you want to use this light in a quiet room, you can forget it, it is only good for noisy sets and shoots where sound doesn’t matter.
Next problem is that the LEDs on this light don’t produce a clean 5500k daylight color balance. They have a greenish tint comparing to my other LEDs. This can be corrected with specific gels that could be bought separately, but it shouldn’t be this way.
Next problem is that the LEDs on this light don’t produce a clean 5500k daylight color balance. They have a greenish tint comparing to my other LEDs. This can be corrected with specific gels that could be bought separately, but it shouldn’t be this way.
Another problem with the light is its poor design and built quality. It’s very plasticky and feels like it won’t hold up to regular use. Certainly if it would fall (and light’s often do, because so very often we forget to put the sand bags in place or just don’t have them) at least the casing would get cracked. The Camtree lights that I used to have and my current 500LED are some much better build; both are metal and sturdy, giving me so much more confidence that they will last for years. Also the way light stand connection is designed puts the whole weight of the light on top of the holder. The light should be adjusted around the center point of weight like all the decent lights, including Camtree and my Meking 500LED. The design of the 1900LED makes adjusting it really annoying and if you don’t tighten the knob well enough the light will fall forward or back. This also makes it difficult to secure the light downwards or upwards.
The last problem I recently discovered is that the dimmer now acts very strangely. Last time I’ve used it, it wouldn’t really adjust the light properly and started flickering. Maybe the light got hot and it will work fine next time, but again, it should happen even if light gets hot, everything should work properly.
I do not recommend this light at all and I highly advice everyone to stay away from this and similar lights, which are based on exactly the same design including the 520LED and 1000LED sold by china_lighting, injoycamera and photolight to name a few.
Please read my newly updated BIG LED LIGHT GUIDE to learn about the lights that are actually worth looking at.
The last problem I recently discovered is that the dimmer now acts very strangely. Last time I’ve used it, it wouldn’t really adjust the light properly and started flickering. Maybe the light got hot and it will work fine next time, but again, it should happen even if light gets hot, everything should work properly.
I do not recommend this light at all and I highly advice everyone to stay away from this and similar lights, which are based on exactly the same design including the 520LED and 1000LED sold by china_lighting, injoycamera and photolight to name a few.
Please read my newly updated BIG LED LIGHT GUIDE to learn about the lights that are actually worth looking at.
RSS Feed
