Kelvin Epos 300: CCT readings by Jem Schofield

Transcript, for avid readers:

All right, everybody, here we are with another episode of The Daily Drop, and I want to get back to one of my favorite subjects, which is lighting.

I’ve been using the Epos 300 from Kelvin for a while, and I’m pretty blown away by the quality of light that it produces. I’ve actually been using it as the main key through an Octa 3 from Dop Choice for most of the recent episodes that I’ve been shooting, and it’s just rock-solid in terms of color temperature. So on and so forth.

I also love these little magnetic modifiers here. This is the Dome one, which is spreading the light 180°. I’m using it in this softbox here, which you can’t see, but what it really does is it eliminates those hotspots in that type of light fixture. Push that through magic cloth, Bob’s your uncle.

When I first started using RGB LEDs, it was really in a very different context. We were in a world where we had daylight LEDs for production that were getting pretty decent. There were also some bi-color units coming out that were giving us basically the ability to tune in terms of color like hue, saturation, intensity, but we could get those different correlated color temperatures, white light going from basically a candlelight to a daylight color temperature. If you look inside of this array on this chip-on-board, it is very different.

This is something called RGBACL, red, green, blue, amber, cyan, lime. There are also RGB WW fixtures out there that are quite popular where you have a red, a green, and a blue LED, and then you basically have two blue LEDs, and they have phosphor in front of them. So there’s this compound, and it gets excited by the blue LED, and depending on what kind of phosphor is in front of the LED, you get a particular color temperature. And in fact, that goes way back to when we started using daylight-based LEDs. You had a blue emitter and then you had phosphor, and then we started to get bi-color. So you had a blue emitter and different types of phosphor to give you different correlated color temperatures. You get the basic idea.

So RGBACL, red, green, blue, amber, cyan, lime, kind of blows my mind because there are no white LEDs.

So RGBACL, red, green, blue, amber, cyan, lime, kind of blows my mind because there are no white LEDs. There’s no phosphor in front of the LED emitters that’s creating the white light. It’s the combination of those six colors that’s giving you that white light. And of course, hue, saturation, intensity, so you get all of the 360° hue colors, all of that stuff. Okay, what I’m interested in 95 to 99% of the time is white light and how accurate that is and how I can use it in production. Because most of the time what we’re doing is we are shooting people. We’ve got people in the frame, and we want to make sure that they are being captured accurately in terms of white light, regardless of the correlated color temperature. And this has a huge range. I mean, you can go all the way up to 20,000 Kelvin. And quite honestly, when you get towards the end of the day and at certain times of day, it’s not always daylight at 5600 or 6000 Kelvin. It can go all the way up to 10,000 Kelvin and above. So it’s great to have a fixture that can do that kind of stuff.

Watch the whole video here