Photography and Video Lighting - Testing 5x CFL 105W bulbs, 6500K, 2625W in total

PLEASE READ: flicker is a camcorder issue, is not caused by the lamps.
For some reason the Sanyo VPC PD2 sensor doesnt like high lighting situations.
So dont worry about flickering, its not because of bulbs, they are very good.

Just a rapid testing of these big CFL bulbs.
The camera used is a personal camcorder so its all automatic and I can't set shutterd speed or aperture in any way.
So, when light become intense it's automatically decrease the exposure and looks like dark.

The CFL lamps have one big advantage on traditional incadescent bulbs: they are very efficient, about 80%.
Incadescent bulbs are 20% efficient, it means that 80% of the energy is lost in heat and not for lighting.
CFL lamps lost only 20% of the energy used in heat.
So you can't compare the power used by CFL lamps with incadescent bulbs.
These CFL bulbs are from J-Flash, chinese manufacturer (like almost the CFL lamps on the market), rated for 105W and producing light like a 525W incadescent bulb!!!
Color temperature is 6500°K, so they are very very very white, in technical name: cool daylight.
These lamps should produce about 4000 lumen for each lamp, so the total lumen output should be about 20000 lumen!
Like almost CFL lamps, these have a CRI (color rendering index) of 80 or more.
Incandescent bulbs have a CRI of 100.

Note: the flickering happens only with my personal camcorder (Sanyo Xacti VPC-PD2), with Canon Legria/Vixia HF M31 there isn't any kind of flicker.
Xacti's sensor seems not like CFL lamps. Who cares :-D

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• studio lighting
• photo lighting
• continuous
• cfl
• video lighting
• chroma key
• softbox
• umbrella
• illumination
• compact fluorescent lamp

[scottidee]

EYE WANT THESE LIGHTS ASAP

[AemmeDesign]

@kinstar

Yeah, i recorded this video with personal camcorder, so there's any manual mode.

The cam is adjusting the exposure in automatic, so the light looks very low when it limit the exposure.

[AemmeDesign]

@rx7isfat1

IT depends on how much light there is in the shoot moment :-)

By the way for overpower the sun I suggest to use a good flash unit (or multiple flash unit) instead of fluorescent lamps.

Fluorescent light are almost for indoor use in my opinion. :-)

[kinstar]

atfirst i thou the lights where only good for close range lighting, but they i relised it was the way your cam was adjusting the light around the light. only when you moved the cam view away then i saw how bright they where nice

[rx7isfat1]

very cool lights. Are they bright enough to use under the sun? Another word can they over power the sun?

[TheMash84]

@DanyyyelV

Look for them on Ebay, they are J-Flash bulbs, rated for 105w, but I measured the power consumption and the result are about 80W, so they are not real 105W bulbs...

There are two kind of J-Flash lamps that I found, the earlier models have the plastic base holding shiny, they look very cheap. These have an opaque plastic base and they look well built.

By the way I think there are too many CFL manufacturer, and every lamp and brand behave different from others.

You should try them...

[TheMash84]

@DanyyyelV

I tried them with Canon Legria HF M31, at highest shutter speed (1/2000) and it doesnt flicker in any way.

I have a video test of it, I'll post it in the next few hours, for your information ;-)

I can say they are a good product, they not flicker, color stable (all the lamps have the same white balance and light color), actually they didnt failed, and throws very high amount of lumen (they are equal to the Philips Tornado High Lumen 65W, which are about 4400 lumen, I tried).

[TheMash84]

@DanyyyelV

I think the video is misleading you, because I wrote in the video description about that flickering.

It's a camcorder issue, is a cheap personal camcorder, a Sanyo VPC PD2, when you point the cam against very hard light the video start to flicker, it happens with incandescent and halogen bulbs too.

Those J-Flash lamps are pretty good I can say, not flickering, very stable light color during use, and they are the most white CFL i've tried, infact they are COOL DAYLIGHT.

[TheMash84]

@DanyyyelV

How many watt is that philips bulb? What model is? I dont want to have CFL bulbs only, but I'd like to choose basing on what I have to digitalize.

Yes, CFL lamps are not natural lights and have the tendency to stress eyes, cause headache and emit electrostic radiation and UV rays.

Infact I try to not use them for living lighting.

[TheMash84]

@DanyyyelV

Hello, not at all, I like to share experiences ;-)

Yes, I know the CRI issue, most of CFL have a CRI of about 80-82, so it cuts some colos from the spectrum, which is not the best thing.

I totally agree with you about color temperature and wattage are not the most important.

I studied most of aspect of lighting so I knew about this drawback of CFL.

Btw CRI 80 is not all this bad, I dont know the CRI of these lamps, but they render color almost identically of incandescent.