Alright, I've got a, hopefully, quick video
for you today on these new Aputure lights.
Aputure sent these two panels to me,
the P60C and the P60X,
and normally I would try to do a bit of a deeper dive
on these lights, but I just don't really have enough time.
The embargo for these lights is sandwiched between two
other embargoes that are for big products
that I know you guys also care about.
But Aputure's been great to me,
so I still want to give them a little bit of exposure
on these products because I think they're great.
So I've already been testing this P60X,
which is a bicolour panel,
and I haven't really used the P60C too much.
I just took it out of the box to make sure that it worked,
as claimed. So we'll go over a couple of the specs.
/I'll tell you which specs I validated
and I'll show you some of the footage that
I captured using this light, because I took it to my home
office and shot with it a little bit there.
And shout-out to Lindsay over on the Zoom.
Big thanks to her.
So both of the lights come with the same accessories.
As you can see, there's a soft box attached to this one,
which is a lot better than the previous easy box,
whatever it was called.
So that's the panel, and this is the little box here.
It just elastics on, so it's much easier to get on.
Don't know if you remember, the other one, you used to have
to like, attach these rods and then build the whole rod out
and it didn't even do a very good job.
This one does a better job, but still not super convincing.
And you'll see in the footage example
that I think using just an umbrella is probably still
the way to go, but I'm glad they included this.
And if you combine them together,
you get a really great look.
So speaking of umbrellas,
the head that these are coming with now is so much better
and the umbrella holder is right in here
and it's on the proper top half of it,
so it tilts with the light.
So it's great. So you can just use a really cheap modifier
and these lights actually look pretty darn good.
Again, show you that footage. One accessory difference is that
these older lights came with the, you know,
the Aputure remote.
Remember the old faithful Aputure remote?
This one does not.
This is purely on the Sidus Link app.
Aputure's obviously switching everybody over to the app.
This works on that. I'm not going to cover the app.
I've covered it so many times before,
but you can control everything from the app,
output, your colour range on the RGB one,
and your, you know, CCT temperature on that one,
as well as any effects and that kind of thing.
So, it's like a modern version of the old 672.
However, it doesn't come with NPF batteries.
That was one thing that was a bit
of a value add, they used to recommend on the old light,
was it used to get a pair of NPF batteries
and these ones still take a pair,
see if I can pivot this for you...
These ones still come with two receptacles for NPF batteries,
but they don't come with them in the package.
Other than that, pretty basic interface for this one,
you've got a knob for intensity in one percent
increments from one percent all the way up to 100 percent,
obviously. And you can see the output, it's, it's intense.
And the other knob in this case is for colour temperature,
which goes from 6500 Kelvin to 3200 Kelvin.
You'll notice that as you cycle through,
there's not any crazy jumps as you go through the range.
Nice and smooth. The range is different on the C.
The C is sort of just the superior model
in a lot of ways. Then, there's also an effects button.
I'm not going to go through them just in case you guys
are photosensitive. I don't want to, you know,
flash lights on you. But, this one has just a few effects.
You know, your basic bicolour, flashy kind of ones.
This one has all the other effects, you know,
like party mode and fireworks and flashy coloured lights
and all that stuff.
So there's, you know, fewer effects on the P60X.
It also comes with a grid that you can attach
to the front of that soft box that I showed you.
All right, let's open up this one,
just so I can show you any differences,
and then I'll cover the specs that
I validated and then I'll show you a little sample footage
and then I got to go shoot something different.
Okay, so like I said, everything's the same.
So you're going to get the soft box,
going to get the bag and the grid,
and that's what comes in the box.
Inside the bag, this bag might be bigger.
It might be a little bit heavier.
So we've got the power brick,
the cord that goes from the brick to the mains power.
And then again, one of these heads.
Something I wanted to check was if the power bricks
are the same, like if you can mix them up,
if you had both lights or if that's a problem.
Output 15 volts, six amps for 90 watts. 15 volts, 16 amps, watts.
They seemed like the same power brick,
so I think you should be able to interchange them.
And they've also made it so that the, the plug here
is a locking type, so it doesn't come undone,
which I actually have had happen to me a couple of times
on the 672. One of the biggest problems
of the 672 as well was the way that this connected
to the light, it didn't have this locking mechanism,
it was like an old like Dyn-style power connector
that just went into the light
and was kind of just dangling there.
So these, as you can see, are underneath now,
which is great and they're the locking type.
So even if you do give them a good yank,
you don't have to worry about snapping it out of your light
or breaking it. So really just build quality improvements
all the way across the board. Nothing to complain about there.
You can see this one is definitely bigger
and it's heavier in my hand than the X.
It's got a different set up on the front.
This one, you can actually see the diodes,
and this one has more frosting there and then
the interface is a bit different as well.
So on this one, now you can see you've got your intensity
over here. Same thing, one percent from zero up to 100.
But then you've also got your CCT over here.
This one has a greater range, now.
We can go all the way to 7500 Kelvin and all
the way down to 2500 Kelvin.
Put it back at 5600, and then we have
a green-magenta adjustment,
which is quite nice if you need to match to other lights
or if it greens up over time or something,
you've got control for that.
And then we've got a light mode button here that if we
press in, we can switch between CCT,
which we were on, to HSI,
that's your colour changing mode.
The effects, different gels, which is nice.
So let's go into HSI, and then now, the control switch,
where this one is your hue.
This is my favourite way for RGB,
I prefer HSI over actual RGB. So you switch your hue,
so if we want to put it on 285,
which is normally what I use for my purple lights,
and then this is the saturation knob now, the S,
so we can turn that all the way down
and then it should be less and less purple as we go.
That one seems to have a bit of a curve to it,
and then your intensity knob is still your intensity knob.
Now, if we go in the menu here,
this one has fan mode, which is either smart or medium,
and I going to put it on medium so that you can hear the fans.
[button clicks softly] [silence]
So they're pretty quiet. To be honest,
I didn't really hear them kick in that much.
So I'd probably leave it on smart,
obviously, it only uses as much as it needs.
But if you want to do noise reduction,
I'd probably just put it on medium
and just leave it on there all the time.
And then you can probably noise reduce that pretty easily.
We've got some controls there for the Bluetooth connectivity.
And then it also has studio mode, which is great.
So if you like your lights, like I do, where
I can just flick one big switch and then they all turn
on as soon as they're provided power,
you have that option.
Or you can have them where when you give them power,
they don't turn on until you physically go and turn them
on, on the light. Let's see if the P60X is any louder.
So for the P60X,
we still have fan mode and we still have studio mode.
If we go into fan mode, smart, medium.
Let's put it on medium and have a listen.
So the fan's going now.
[silence]
It's still really, really quiet. So I don't think
that's going to be an issue at all.
Again, you could probably just leave it on medium.
Alright, just for fun I put it on party lights, 3%.
So we have a three percent party lights going
on in the background there.
So the colour accuracy between
the two lights is actually pretty similar.
And what I like about Aputure is that they've started doing
a lot more metrics for colour accuracy, which I really like.
I made a video not that long ago talking about all
the different metrics using this Sekonic,
and you know, which ones are better?
But you don't have to worry about it with Aputure
because they give you all of them.
So you've got a CRI of greater than 95,
a TLCI of 96+. They've got the TM30 in here,
which is getting a 94 and a 103, respectively,
and SSI is 83 for tungsten, and 74 for daylight.
And I got, these results were accurate within
a margin of error when I tested them with the C100.
So I approve of those numbers and yeah,
the max power output and these is 60 watts.
Hence why they're P60s. And the P60C is an RGB WW panel
that's rated for 50,000 hours.
And then as far as output, at one meter,
just no soft box or anything,
we'll go with 5600 Kelvin for the measurement.
You're getting 5900 lux,
which is so much more powerful than they used to be,
like the 672. The P60X on the other hand,
at 5600 Kelvin at one meter is 5070 lux.
So similar, but again a little bit, a little bit less powerful.
So when it comes to colour accuracy,
both panels are actually really similar.
They're quite similar in a lot of ways.
You know, build quality's the same, design idea's
the same, the P60C basically just a little bit bigger,
a little bit brighter.
And it obviously offers you full colour,
because it's an RGB WW panel,
but it also costs a hundred dollars more.
Again, I think it's worth it because it has more versatility.
But if you just need a basic bicolour light,
this is the best sort of offering
for the money that Aputure has right now, in my opinion,
and I think you'd be surprised with the output.
And let's actually jump to the shot that
I set up in my home office,
where I used only this light to record a follow up video
on a computer. And I was impressed with how it looked
when I just stuck the umbrella in front of it.
All right, so I'm just getting set up to film something
different here at the home office,
where I don't normally have lights.
So I brought the P60X and I set it up here just so
I could have a little light on me.
This isn't the finished shot,
but I wanted to do it with just that light illuminating me.
I have the soft box on it that it came with,
but no grid and nothing else.
I'm going to switch over to the umbrella in a minute
because I do find this a little bit,
it's contrast, it's intense,
it's a bit spotty and it's contrasty.
But this is, this is what it looks like. It's set to,
I think, 5500 Kelvin and I'm recording this
on the A1 and looks like this with just the light,
at 10 percent power.
And I think I'm at f2.8 on the lens.
You know, 3200 ISO, maybe.
And this is, this is what we've got.
Okay, now I'm going to put on the umbrella. All right.
So now we're back with the umbrella on and I had to turn
the light up to 25 percent to get, I think,
a similar exposure. And I think this looks much nicer.
Obviously, it's a lot softer.
We're getting a better wrap from it.
And the light between me and the environment isn't
so contrasty now.
And what's great is that you can actually leave the soft box
on which helps control that spill because usually if you
have a panel and an umbrella, you know,
you get that side spill. So I'm using the soft box without
the grid just to sort of control it and point it here.
And then we're getting a bit of a double diffusion.
You usually don't need it, but it was easy for me
just to pop it on, and it's good to know that you can still
put the umbrella on even if you have the soft box on.
All right, so here we go. So this is an example setup.
I've got the two lights in the background
on and just this light here. That's it.
Turn the light up a little to thirty three percent so
I could turn down the ISO so that these weren't
as intense. And this just gives you an example of,
you know, a pretty affordable setup you could do with just
the one light and a couple RGB lights.
And I think it looks pretty good, to be honest. All right,
one last thing I want to test before I get out of here
is whether or not the batteries provide the exact same output
as the mains power and also, what happens if you do them
all at once? I'm pretty sure it actually charges
the batteries. So first, let's switch back over to CCT
and let's jack the intensity all the way up to 100 percent.
And it tells us over here what sort of battery life we can
expect. Right now, it's greater than two hours because we're
on mains power. So let's plug in some NPF batteries.
And one thing that I also used to hate about
the old Aputure light was how bad it was to stick those
batteries in, to try to get them out
there's like a little prong and it'd, like, scrape your thumb.
These ones just have a push button release on the side
and they work quite well. It's plastic, but it seems okay.
I probably wouldn't want to drop this light
and have it hit the batteries.
I think that that would probably break it.
The plastic seems strong and moulded,
but it's still plastic. So now, on battery power,
we've got 43 minutes on full power with two NPF 970s.
I'm going to plug this in.
It might flash, but let's see if it gets any brighter
by switching to mains.
The output's exactly the same. So 43 minutes on two batteries,
that's not too bad.
Let's, I'll give you an idea if you go
a little bit lower intensity, sorry,
one more flicker on this. At 33 percent,
we're getting greater than two hours and at 66 percent,
we're getting an hour and five minutes.
It says in the data sheet that it charges
the Sony NPF style batteries.
I'm not sure that I see any indicator that it's doing so,
but it says that it is in the spec sheet.
One last thing I want to test,
think I keep saying one last thing, one last thing.
This is how it gets out of hand when
I make my videos. Testing two things, actually.
We're testing how strong,
at like a 90 degree angle, is the light and two, let's check
and see if the response curve is linear for the intensity.
Scratch that. It does show that it's charging,
but only when the, when the light is turned off.
So right now, we're running at 100 percent.
32,400.
Let's turn it down to 50% and see if that number is halved.
If it is, then we know we're getting a linear response.
If not, then oh, now that I turn the power down,
I'm actually also seeing
a battery charging indicator rate above that two hours
remaining thing. So I think it's just when you're at 100 percent
that it doesn't, let me try that again. Yeah.
Once you turn it up above 60, once you go above 60 percent,
it switches to mains power only,
when you go below 60 percent, its mains power
and charging. 16200.
So that's right around half. Right? What'd I say?
32500 before?
And let's go to a 25 percent.
And so now we should get, what? Around 8100?
That's another one, you can see right there, 8160 lux.
So it seems like the response is linear.
So I really have nothing negative to say about these
lights. I think they're outstanding.
Everything I threw at them, every, you know,
curious comparison of the previous light.
It's just, they have everything. Everything has been upgraded,
everything's been improved.
And I would say, for what they are,
they're pretty much flawless.
The only complaint I think
I made in this whole video was that
I wish they came with free batteries.
But what are you going to do? I still think for the price,
they're offering tremendous value. So, good job, Aputure.
Keep doing what you do.
[funky outro music]
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