This is my old H198 LED light from Aputure...
[click]
And today... we’re gonna upgrade it.
Let’s get Undone.
[offbeat music]
♪ Gerald Undone ♪
♪ He’s crazy. ♪
What is happening, everybody? I’m Gerald Undone,
and today I want to talk to you
a little bit about LED lights because
I’m gonna be upgrading the H198 today.
Now, the H198, this one here,
is a good little light. It’s OK. I really like Aputure’s lights--
I’m shooting on one right now There’s a bigger
Aputure light right there-- and I like ‘em.
I think they have great value and a lot of cool stuff.
Now, this one’s OK. It’s got a couple drawbacks to it.
You know, it’s not the brightest light in the world.
When it’s on full power--
it looks like about that. So, sure, I mean...
It’s bright enough to be, like, a fill light
in some situations, and you can definitely use it for,
like, some accent stuff.
But as a key light, it’s a little bit lacking
in certain scenarios for sure.
Battery-wise, it’s a bit of a problem.
Right now I’m powering it off of a big Sony battery
but underneath that is a tray
where you can put in six AA batteries.
That’s a lot of battery, that’s a lot of AA batteries,
and it chews through them pretty quickly, so I don’t--
My biggest problem with it, really, is that power situation.
And that’s why I was excited about Aputure’s replacement--
I guess sort of like, the successor to this light--
the AL-F7.
Now, the F7’s been out for a little while,
but I was waiting for the right time to get it,
and that was today because it was on sale
at my local camera store for like, $20 off.
And also I’m selling this one on Kijiji today,
so it kind of works out to where I’m not really displacing
much cash. Kijiji, for those of you that don’t know,
is kind of like Canadian Craigslist, or something.
Do they have Kijiji in the rest of the world?
I don’t think they do, I think it’s Canadian only.
Anyway, so, what is the AL-F7 and why is it better?
I’m pretty excited about this light,
so I want to show you what it’s all about.
So this is the AL-F7. Well, this is the case for it.
Similarly to the one H198 Aputure usually gives you,
nice little, you know, zipped-up tote bags
that come with it to carry all of your accessories.
This one includes a USB cable-- This is one of
the awesome points of why I was excited for the F7,
I’ll get to that in just one second.
It comes with a ball and socket head,
just like the H198 did, but they’ve upped
their ball and socket head. This is, like, heavy. It's metal.
It feels like you could hold, like, a mirrorless camera on it.
It’s-- it’s a really, really nice little ball and socket
to just be included, because
you can order those things for $20, $30 on their own.
You’ve got a little 1/4" to 3/8" adapter,
and then you’ve got the light. Now, the light comes with
a couple different diffusion panels, but no CTOs,
because this is a colour-changing light,
it has-- like, you can dial in the temperature.
Now, the H198 also has a colour-changing variant,
but I didn’t go for it originally
because they usually have less power
than the ones that have a static colour temperature.
So this one doesn’t come with CTOs,
it just comes with sort of a small amount of diffusion
and a heavy amount of diffusion panel.
But this is what the light looks like.
And what’s great about it is
it still takes the Sony batteries,
so you can still pop one of those on, like this.
[click]
And they've improved their-- Aputure's kind of been famous
for having kind of difficult battery sockets
where you, like, can’t really get them out.
I don’t know why, ’cause they make some pretty cool stuff,
but they never really thought of just a really quick
and easy release button. But now this one has it,
so that’s a nice little upgrade.
The overall build quality feels better.
It feels smaller and more compact, but it’s actually
more powerful than the H198, so they definitely
packed more into a tiny little body,
but it feels like it could take more of a beating.
And then the beauty of it here
is that it has a USB Type-C connection on it--
as well as D-Tap, by the way, for those of you
that are interested. It also has a D-Tap connection,
but I don’t really mess with D-Tap that much,
but everybody’s got USB stuff. So USB Type-C connection,
comes with the standard USB cable.
And then if you have something like this,
like a power bank, a USB power bank,
you can plug the USB cable into the power bank...
and now you can use your light like this--
I’ll turn it on so you can see.
Make sure it’s not too bright so I don’t kill you guys.
So now you can use the light with just on USB power,
and instead of the power bank,
you could plug it into any 2A adapter.
So if you have, like, a tablet and it came with
a 2A wall adapter for your tablet,
you can plug the USB into that
and then you have constant power just on AC power.
But USB power banks are typically a lot cheaper
and have higher capacity than the batteries that you would
buy for your cameras, or, like, the Sony--
for instance, these Sony... you know, this is the 970.
If you bought one of these from Sony, like, the branded one
you know, they’re, like, 150 bucks
or something like that. They're expensive.
So, you know, power banks now, you can get $30.
You can get a power bank that has, like twice,
three times, four times the capacity of a 970 battery.
And it just takes USB, which is pretty sweet.
Now, you can’t just plug this USB in your computer.
Probably won’t work because your computer won’t output 2A.
But anything that will put out 2A, you can jazz it up with
and then beyond that, when you set it to 5500K--
I actually think the centre point for this one is 5600.
But power-wise, when you’re right in the middle...
So can you see-- If I turn it down,
can you see the two different-coloured bulbs?
Well, they’re not bulbs, but they’re LEDs.
But there’s, like, blue ones and orange ones.
I don’t know how well you can see that.
When you’re running it at completely warm--
which would be, like, 3200--
or completely cool-- which I think on this one is,
like, 90-- how high does it go?
Yeah, 9500 Kelvin-- then, as you can see
we’re only using half of the lights.
So that power is gonna be reduced, but when we put it
in the middle, which is 5500 or 5600K--
the tests on their website, the specs are at 5500,
but they say that 5600 is the brightest one.
So at 5500K, this one outputs 5500 lux at half a meter away
at 100%.
So it looks something like this.
This is gonna be really bright.
So that's the 5500 lux.
The H198 outputs 3430 lux,
so this one is almost 50% brighter
at the same colour temperature.
And something else that's cool about the power is you can
actually dial this light down in 1% increments,
all the way down to 1% power.
So from 1% all the way to 100%.
Often, the lights-- like the H198, it only goes down
to I think, 10%, and it jumps around.
It’s like, 10, 14, 18, 22. So it’s--
I mean, I don’t know how important that is,
but it’s kinda cool that you can, like,
really, really dial it in.
And it just uses a single knob.
You can change the temperature or change the power that way.
And then there’s an on/off switch.
So you can power with USB continually, forever
if you have the AC adapter, or however long
your power banks are. You can use the Sony batteries
if you want. Now, they’re separate power systems,
so I’m almost 100% positive that if you plug
a Sony battery in and then also connect it
to the wall or use the power bank,
I don’t think you can charge the Sony battery via USB.
I don’t think that’s gonna work like that.
You need to have, like, a higher-- you need to have
like, 7.4V or something like-- yeah, 7.4V.
And since USB is only 5V, you're not gonna be able
to provide the right voltage or current in order
to correctly charge the Sony battery.
So they’re just different power sources,
but there’s no charging going on.
Some websites that sell this light say “USB charging.”
There's no USB charging. There’s no battery
inside of the light. That's not a thing.
But the amount of power supply options are fantastic:
D-Tap, USB, Sony batteries.
You don’t gotta monkey around with AAs.
Love it. It’s lighter, it's smaller.
You got 1/4"-20 threads on three different positions
on the light, so you can mount it
in all kinds of different ways.
It’s brighter at the daylight temperatures,
and it has variable colour, and it comes with two diffusers.
It is fantastic.
Now, it does cost a little bit more than H198.
I think retail, for me ...these prices are changing
quite a bit now that there’s multiple products out,
but I think originally it was, like, $110 for the H198--
Canadian-- and this one was, like, $150.
So you’re looking probably about 40-50% more,
but it’s not breaking the bank. It’s not a huge amount more.
So I would say for a lot of you guys out there,
'Cause I know you watch a lot of my lighting stuff,
if you’re looking for “what’s a really good value
single light that I can use for a lot of purposes?”
I think this is it. I think this is the best bang
for the buck, multipurpose, multifunction, multi-powered,
just sort of, like-- this is my all-around beater,
small, compact light. The AL-F7 from Aputure.
It is fantastic. I-- I am in love with this light.
So I just wanted to make this quick little video--
I hope it was quick, I dunno how long
I’ve been running-- to let you guys know about this light,
because I’m pretty pumped about it. I think it’s great.
And now I gotta go sell my H198 to recoup a little bit
of the cost that I spent on this to make it gravy!
’Cause now it’s like, “It didn’t even cost me much.”
If you guys are looking at one, you should check it out now,
because I think they’re on sale for a little while,
so you can save $20 that way too.
Anyway! Hope you found this video informative
or entertaining. And if you did, make sure you leave it
the old thumbs-up. But if you did not find it informative
or entertaining, feel free to hit the dislike button twice.
Alright... I’m done.
♪