GVM RGB Video Lighting with Bowens Mount - LED Video Light Kit 8 Modes of Scenes Lighting Video Spotlight Dimmable Bi-Color Daylight Balanced Continuous Output Lighting for YouTube/Studio/Interview

I had the old one for a year and I just saw the new one here and I had to GET iIT!I'll go straight to the point:The MAJOR improvement in this light was the added Tungsten LEDs on the COB Chip. The old light, they relied on the RGBs trying to "imitate" the tungsten, with no success. it was just not useful. Now, the hole thing changed!You asked...GVM listened. The power supply from the old light had to be hung loose, dangling all over the place, but I already took care of it by attaching it to my light stand with an adhesive cushion plus Velcro, but their idea of a cage to hold the power supply at the bottom of the light was even better, and they designed in a way that it doesn't get in the way of tilting the light.The power cord now is 6 meters long or 20 feet, and with the power supply attached to the light, twice as perfect.The only thing I'm not too crazy about is the delay that they put in the software that takes over 9 seconds to complete, for example, to change the CCT from 5600K to 3200K, I have to wait until it finally finishes fading to the setting I wantAnother cool thing over the old light, you have much more control of the brightness. The 1%, 2% etc, is super DIM, meaning, if you need to get the light extremely close to the subject without ever exposing your footage, you can, especially when shooting at extremely low depth of fields such as f/1.2!The effects are awesome. And nope... The old light didn't have that either.So, do I recommend this light? ABSOLUTELY! Especially the fact that RGB lights in shape of a Mono Light is very rare! You see mostly light panels. THIS light, you can use reflectors, ALL kinds of Bowens mount modifiers. Now, Imagine a light that has RGB and FX with modifiers ON. The creativity and versatility is infinite.I also made a FULL and LONG VIDEO demonstrating everything. The video is located / uploaded DIRECTLY at the seller's page at the bottom since the video quality is much higher resolution than uploading the video here as a review. Check it out!

OverviewI use lights like these for music videos, talk shows, interviews, and promo videos. I have two of the old version of these lights and was a bit hesitant to spend $467 for these lights but then Amazon offered a $80 off coupon which brought their price almost down to the cost of the original version so I decided to give them a try. I have ran into too many situations where two didn't feel like enough and I felt like 4 would be perfect.THE GOOD-The Bowens Mount Latch - They fixed that terrible thumbscrew from the old version. The new latch is way better.-The Power Brick - I had to buy a rubber casing that was meant for a water bottle and put the power brick in that then hang it from the light stand to take the weight off of the cord, the new version is much better.-RGB - Of course this feature is awesome in both versions, RGB is so much more useful than daylight only and it provides infinite color possibilities. The colors in the new version are way richer and more true than the previous version.-Build Quality - The build quality is acceptable, better is always better of course but I do think you get what you pay for with these lights.-Lighting Effects - I think these are pretty cool, but for me only Paparazzi is interesting because it is a strobe effect that could be useful for music videos.THE BAD-No Umbrella Mount - This is the most disappointing missing feature for me. Umbrella diffusers are so compact and easy to use yet the new version still does not offer a way to mount an umbrella. I'm sure I could rig up something but at this price point it would be simple to include it.-Light Mismatch - This is a big one for me. If you have the previous version the colors out of this light does not match the previous version. So if you wanted to have a bank of 4 lights (2 old and 2 new) all backlighting your talent it would be very obvious that they were different colors. This is very annoying and the whole reason you stick with a single brand. The daylight kelvin lighting does match but not the RGB.-Lighting Effects - They came so close to making these really cool.....why can't you change the color of the lighting effects? I would love to be able to set it to strobe and be able to pick from the RGB options. They have "party" modes which will strobe through the RGB but it does not allow you to just pick Blue or Red for instance then set it to strobe. I may need to read the manual, maybe I overlooked it somewhere.The lighting modes are named weird and most are barely useable like the candle effect and TV, I couldn't even tell what they were meant to do. A much better approach would have been to simply add a "Strobe" mode let the user pick the color or colors and the delay between flashes. I don't know if these can receive firmware upgrades but if they can it would be easy to add.-Brightness - The brightness is a big disappointment, I checked all of the specs before buying but since the lumens output is not listed for the original version I had no way to tell if this one was brighter, I even emailed GVM and got no response. Once you put a modifier on this light and set it to daylight light output pretty much drops to zero. I think a bounce umbrella with a silver lining will be an effective way to diffuse these lights....but they don't include an umbrella mount.CONCLUSIONI know a lot of "bad" is listed above, with that being said I still think these lights are a good buy as long as you know what you are getting and what could be improved. If you already have an investment in the old version and just need more lights I think it might be better to buy the old version because the RGB colors out of the new version clearly doesn't match the old version. All the new features are great but if you can't evenly light a scene then nothing else matters.There are things you can do to hide the mismatch like use different colors, keep some off camera, etc, but for these prices you shouldn't have to. If you really need to flood a scene with blue or orange or pink, you shouldn't have to worry about which version of the lights you are using.These lights are simply not bright enough to work with most diffusers unless you use a lot of them. I will probably stick to bouncing off of ceilings for diffusion if I keep this light.

I'm a big fan of GVM lights. I have several products from them. So I confidently purchased this nearly $500 RGB light with high expectations. I was genuinely excited to get what I'd thought was an RGB version of an Aputure 120 killer... I was wrong. It's bright enough, but not too justify what I paid for it. The build quality is OK, but not high enough. There's a random piece of something rattling in my unit but I'm sure that's just a quality control coincidence. It's heavy and large but not loud. I'll give it that... It's rather quiet at 100 percent brightness. The light output though is lacking... It's not much brighter than my GVM RGB square panels I think they're model 80D or something.. which isn't cool considering they're like 2lbs per light versus like 8lbs or more for this unit. All in all its OK, but I'm disappointed in the product for the price I paid.