Today we're discussing this:
a light that not only packs an incredible punch
for its size, but one that does so
while being unquestionably cute.
Let's get undone!
(bass beat)
- [Narrator] Gerald Undone.
He's crazy.
What's happening, everybody?!
I'm Gerald Undone and I'm the second last airbender.
So for disclosure, this video is sponsored by Zhiyun,
so it'll be more of a showcase and less of a review,
but I only do showcases on products that I believe in
and I'm not gonna omit any criticisms I have just
because the video is sponsored.
Also, I looked up the correct pronunciation of Zhiyun
before attempting to record this video,
but I just wanna apologize in advance for butchering it
as I've discovered that knowing how to say a Chinese word
and actually getting your mouth to make that sound
are two entirely different things.
So there's actually two lights
we're gonna be discussing today,
the MOLUS G60 and the MOLUS X100.
Alright, so I got quite a few specs
that I wanna go over with you.
But first, design language-wise,
these look completely different
but they actually share quite a few functions
and features that we're gonna go over in a second here.
This one is a 100 watt light
and it reminds me of like a Kodak Brownie
and especially if you put like a little reflector on it,
like a vintage camera with a flash bulb.
And then this one,
you might not be able to tell,
but it's only slightly larger than a Rubik's Cube.
It is very, very small,
and it's definitely the cutest
and most adorable 60 watt light.
I think it's definitely the smallest 60 watt light
I've ever seen or held,
and I like it for that for utility purposes.
But let's jump right into the testing
and start and see how the output is,
color temperature,
how accurate that is,
and the color accuracy results using the Sekonic.
So I'm gonna measure these right here on the table
at about one meter away and share the numbers with you now.
Okay, so I got the X100 setup over here,
sorry for the crazy exposure.
It's at 100% output, that's why.
And it's at 5,500 Kelvin,
and one meter away, we've got the Sekonic C-800,
and so we're gonna take a reading right now,
and you can see that the color temperature
showed up at 5,500 Kelvin, which is great.
That means that the temperature that you set
on the light is showing up pretty accurately over here,
but we are getting a 1.9 green,
which means the light is coming in significantly magenta
and would require a 1.9 green filter
in order to make it zero, make it completely neutral.
Now generally, you want this to be a little bit
on that magenta side when you first get a light,
because these LEDs tend to green up over time.
This one is a little bit strong though,
I've told Zhiyun about it
and they said that they're aware of it,
and they're either gonna fix it with,
it could be it's just a prototype.
I have these prototype units.
It could be that that's causing the problem
or that maybe it's just a firmware fix,
but they're aware of it
and they're gonna address it to reel that in a little bit.
But if we continue down here, we see 3,700 lux,
and then an SSI for daylight of 74,
which is about on par with,
there's newer lights that have been coming out
that have better SSI readings,
but most LEDs of the last few years have been getting
in that sort of mid 70's when it comes to daylight SSI.
So I wouldn't expect these tiny lights to outperform
the new larger, better SSI lights.
So it's fine, it's a fine SSI.
Let's go ahead and switch to Tungsten
and do it again and see what the Tungsten SSI is.
Okay, now we're testing two other things simultaneously.
I have it at 3,200 Kelvin.
Both of these lights are bicolor by the way,
which is another sort
of great feature that they're not just daylight only.
You can go from I think 2,700 up to 6,500 Kelvin.
So I put it on 3,200 Kelvin.
So we can check the Tungsten SSI,
and I've also lowered all the way to 10%,
so we can see if it performs well at low power as well.
Sometimes lights only hit their temperature marks
when you're at 100% output
but when you lower 'em 10%, they just go wonky.
So let's do a reading here at 10% at 3,200 Kelvin,
and we're pretty close again to 3,200 Kelvin,
so that's good.
The green magenta isn't as big of a problem
on the Tungsten side.
And for Tungsten SSI, we're getting a score of 84.
So again, that's a good result.
All right, now we got the G60 setup
and I'm gonna start in Tungsten
and we'll do the SSI measurement over here.
So I'm getting an 82 SSI in Tungsten,
a little bit lower on the G60.
I guess the price you pay for having it be so small.
Let's drop it down at 10%, 3173,
so really close to 3,200 Kelvin.
Again though that same green magenta problem.
And then the 81,
I've gotten between 81 and 83 SSI in Tungsten mode.
Okay, now we're at 5,500 Kelvin at 100%,
and you can see we're pretty close, 5,400 Kelvin,
a little bit better on the magenta issue
but it's still there pretty substantially.
And we're getting 74 SSI again
and we're coming in at 2000 lux.
Let's throw on the included reflector,
it's this little mini reflector that it comes with.
Probably can't see too well in this shot
but it's very small,
just like everything else with this light,
so let's throw that on.
Okay, so now with the reflector on,
the color temperatures actually,
so we're still at 5,500 Kelvin
but now we're closer to 5,100 Kelvin over here.
But the magenta issue has been resolved somewhat,
and the SSI, the color quality actually goes up.
So the reflector improves the color quality
at the cost of a little bit of temperature accuracy.
And obviously, the output significantly goes up,
went from 2000 lux to 10,000 lux.
But that's because this is one of those reflector designs
that gives you sort of a hot spot
in the center versus an even spread.
So if you want maximum output,
this is the type of reflector you want.
If you want a more even spread,
there's other modifiers that you can use,
just like other brands have been doing lately
with the more hyper reflector design.
That's what you're seeing here just in a mini version.
Now, one thing I wanted to point out
since this has been running
at 100% now for a while, is the fan noise.
I've only ever heard it
when having it 100% for a while.
If you have had less than that, it's completely silent.
And even now,
I'm having trouble hearing it even now
over the people that are like in the hall,
like 20 meters away.
So it's very, very quiet.
I can lift it up to the mic, I don't know,
like nobody puts their lights in the mic,
but can you even hear that?
It's very, very quiet.
Now when it comes actually powering the lights,
this is probably one of their biggest strengths
because they provide you a lot of different options
to do that.
So there's two similarities between them
and then one difference on the X100.
The similarities are that both lights come
with their own power bricks,
that there are 24 volt power bricks
that use a DC barrel input on each of the lights.
As far as cord length on those power bricks,
the one that goes from the brick to the the light itself
is about six feet or two meters, I would say.
And then the one that goes to the wall
is about twice that length.
So it's sufficient.
I kind of wish that this section was longer to be honest,
because otherwise, if you put it up too high,
you're gonna have this thing dangling.
But luckily there are other methods to power it.
As you can see here,
both lights actually accept power delivery over USB-C.
Now I've got this janky setup going here.
We're running the power delivery from the back wall
with a long cable because my power bank died
in the middle of doing this testing.
But this is a 100 watt power bank
and when you have a 100 watt connected,
it'll read a higher number there.
So right now it's saying PD 30
because that's what that charger is.
But obviously you're gonna need
up to a 100 watt power delivery
to do the 100 watt light
and up to 60 watt power delivery to the 60 watt light.
So what happens when you don't have that is you can see here
that when I turn up the brightness
and they're in 1% increments, by the way,
you can go down to zero and go in 1% increments
all the way up.
But if I try to turn it up to 100%,
once I hit 40%, it just stops
and it starts flashing the PD 30 watts thing up here.
When I first saw that,
I thought it was a really clever implementation
because flashing it shows you,
"Hey, hey,
you don't have enough power delivery output."
It's just very intuitive,
and I think it's smart.
And I like that that way,
even if you don't have 100 watt power delivery
with you,
you can still use the light just up to less output.
I think that's brilliant.
And like I said, the same thing works over here,
same display, same everything,
just this one goes all the way up to 100 watts.
The extra powering mode that you have on the X100 though
is this battery port on the side.
Now we've got a even weirder setup going on here.
I'm using the battery currently that comes
with the X100 to power the G60
as a 30 watt USB power delivery source,
so that we can use it to light the battery door over here.
I dunno what's going on anymore.
Okay, but the idea is
that this battery that it comes with as you can see,
can also be used as a separate power delivery source
for other things, whether you wanna charge your phone
or power your 60 watt light with a battery.
But conventionally,
what it's supposed to be used for is you take this thing,
pull off this cover here,
and then you take your battery
and you just slot it in,
and then this is what it looks like.
Now it definitely puts some more weight over here
but the thought of that,
you can offset the 1/4-20,
the one I have attached here over to here.
So you can do a bit more of a balance,
that's better balance now for a handheld shot.
And then now with the battery,
you can go all the way up to 100% output on this light.
And from my testing,
the battery power matches the DC power for lux output.
So this is it with the dome diffuser,
and it's only at 1% at 5,500 Kelvin.
And I mean it's significant
and when it's up close like that,
if you were doing some product shots or whatever,
this is actually pretty soft light.
Actually for this next modifier,
I wanna use the 60 watt light because it's just so cute.
And this modifier's pretty cute as well.
So you just push down on this
and then give it a little bit of a twist and it locks in.
Look at this thing, this is adorable.
Let's put it on the little light here.
There we go.
Look at this thing.
There's something so charming about this little light.
Let's turn it on,
so we can see what we're working with.
By the way,
as far as controls on both these lights,
they're just two dials for each of them,
and then a little LCD screen.
And then there are sort of presets
where if you press the button in,
you jump through different outputs.
And then if you press this one,
you jump through different color temperatures.
So you got conveniences that way,
otherwise you can just turn the knob.
They are a little bit slow in the sense,
like it takes a while to go from 1 to 100,
which is why there's a good thing there's those presets.
Okay, 5,500 Kelvin, 1%,
I'm envisioning like a streaming setup or something,
where maybe you have this just over your monitor.
It's very small, it's very light,
so any kind of stand would do.
And I'm actually still overexposed
but I think it looks good.
And I'm running this on USB-C,
you could have this plugged into your computer
if you got power delivery output or something,
you're just like, boom, you know?
But there's more options.
And now, by the way, with these low powers,
the fan's not even running,
so it's making no noise.
I can't get over how cute this is,
like, seriously.
All right, let's do the fan noise test on this one.
But first, I'll show you how the controls work on this.
You got a color temperature again
with presets if you press it in,
and then 1% increments all the way up to 100%.
And then both lights have
their own separate power button as well.
So this is the power button on this one.
And on the other light, it's on the top there.
As far as actually using that battery to power the light,
it's a 57 watt-hour battery,
so you're gonna get just over 30 minutes.
If you're running at 100%,
you're get like 34 minutes maybe maximum.
I can see that the fan is running
and I think it ramped up to its top speed actually.
So let's give a listen there.
I can hear it if I put it up to my ear
but probably after about a meter away,
it then becomes quieter than the other lights
in my studio that are farther away than that,
if that makes sense.
And one more thing when it comes to control,
I talked about the manual control, but I was told
that Zhiyun is planning on making an app for these
to give you like Bluetooth control.
And there are Bluetooth settings in there,
but because these are pre-production,
we're not app ready yet,
so I wasn't able to test the app,
but it is coming if you're somebody who likes to use apps
to control your lights.
So another accessory you can get is this,
which is a Bowens adapter, I guess,
it goes from the the proprietary mount
that's on these lights
and converts it to a Bowens mount.
Yeah, that looks pretty even.
Let's take it over there
and do a little light set test shot on me.
All right, so I've got the G60 set behind that lantern
like I showed you a second ago,
and I've got it 100% output at 5,500 Kelvin.
And then we adjusted the exposure on the camera to match it.
So we're at ISO 200, which is as low as the camera can go
in this setting at f/2.8 and at 1/50th of a second shutter.
And I'm gonna set the white balance to this color chart
so we can see how the chips look
when the white balance is neutral,
and get a sense of the color accuracy here.
But I would say that despite the green magenta thing
that we picked up on the C-800,
when practically looking at the skin tones here,
I would say that they look quite pleasing.
I don't have any other lights on me,
that's why I moved in front of the regular shot over here.
I just think it looks great for a single light setup.
And it's surprising how small the footprint is
and how light it is,
moving the whole light stand with it on over here,
it's like the lightest this light stand
has ever felt bringing it over here.
So overall, I'm really impressed with these lights.
I do it with the caveat of for their size,
because obviously, I'm using much bigger lights
in the studio that perform better
and they cost 10 times as much,
and you would expect that.
But honestly for this light with its interesting design,
this light for its size,
the fact that this is outputting 60 watts
and this 100 watts,
the fact that this has a battery that you can attach to it,
the fact that they both work off of USB-C power delivery,
there's just so many novel things about these
that I really, really like them.
They're good lights, good price, perform well, small,
what more do you want?
Alright... I'm done.