hey everybody it’s lon seiben and today we’re taking a look at a lighting kit that’s designed to help your video conference calls look better this is from a company called luma cube and it consists of a led light panel here a tripod a suction cup mount and a light diffuser and i’m going to show you how it works and what i think of it here in just a second but i do want to let you know in the interest of full disclosure that i paid for this kit with my own funds because i needed it for my zoom conference call location upstairs all the opinions you’re about to hear are my own no one is paying for this review nor has anyone reviewed or approved what you’re about to see before it was uploaded so let’s get into it now and see what this kit is all about now the price point on the kit is 99 you could probably go out and piece together a kid of your own for less money but if you’re looking for a simple out-of-the-box solution this is probably going to be your best bet it does have a one-year warranty and luma cube has been in this small light business for a while too so i think if you do have a problem you’ll probably get somewhat decent support from them now the one thing you don’t get in the box is a charger for the light you get the charging cable but not the charger itself it is using a standard usb type-c connection here so you can plug it into pretty much any usb power source it’s running with 5 volts here it does use a maximum of 9 watts of power when the light is at its full
brightness so if you wanted to power this off of the wall outlet you’ll want to make sure that the power adapter you’re using provides at least 9 watts of power so i would look for a usb charger that has 5 volts 2 amps at a minimum and that should give you the ability to run the light concurrently otherwise you’re going to have to go off of its internal battery now when the light is at full brightness the battery life is about an hour and a half give or take so you’re not going to get a lot of time out of this battery unless you’ve got it plugged in with enough power to keep it going without having to eat into the battery so just bear that in mind you’ll get through one call on battery but not too many and i found that if you’re in a scenario where you’re really blown out by a window behind you or something like that you really need this thing going at its full brightness so just be prepared for that you do have a number of settings here on the light so when you turn it on by default this little dial here on the side will make it brighter or less bright and it will go up or down in 10 increments here at least until you get to the bottom and then if you hit the button here which is also the power button you can adjust the color temperature of the light so it goes from about 5600k here to 3200k for a warmer image so if you want really warm you go to 3200 if you want something really cold you go up to 5600 and then you can also kind of set it someplace in the middle for a more balanced look i found that a lot of webcams tend to adjust the white balance on their own so as you’re moving this dial up and down depending on who makes your webcam you might see less of an impact by setting that that white balance setting there but you do have the ability to adjust things it’s pretty nice here pretty simple to use and then when you want to turn it off you just hold the
button down for a few seconds and it will switch off now the diffuser here is just like a silicon thing it feels like a cheap phone case and it goes over the top of the light here to soften up the image so if you’re seeing it the light is a little bit too harsh on you this might make it look a little bit better the one issue that you’re going to have with this is that although the light is bright it’s not very big so it doesn’t work so well when it gets further back from you so you have to really i think adjust the brightness to get the right setting for whatever you’re trying to set up in your particular conference call environment if you wanted something more robust you’ll need to go into the broadcast lighting category to get something a little bit better it does have two tripod mounts on it so you’ve got one here for going horizontally you can also mount it vertically by using the mount over here and this will just screw into the suction cup mount here or the tripod mount so we’re gonna do the suction cup one first because i wanted to show you the impact it might have on your laptop screen so let me get this thing adjusted here and we’ll attach it to my macbook and we’ll see how it holds up all right i’ve got the suction cup here mounted to the back of my macbook air and i got to say this thing does not give up it is super strong even when you release it you’ve really got to put a lot of force on it to get it off i think it combines some of that micro suction sticky stuff with a traditional suction cup so it’s really strong which is a good thing i did find though when you have it on your laptop display here that it puts a lot of weight on the hinge so as you can see here when i’ve got my screen all the way back the laptop is basically falling over so you do need to be careful about that it might actually take your screen with it if you do have a weak hinge on your laptop so bear that in mind one issue that you’ll have though if you wear glasses is
that the light is coming directly at you and when you’re in that scenario you’re going to get some reflection off of your glasses so you might want to look at using the tripod instead if you do wear glasses the tripod is pretty easy to set up here what’s nice is that they do give you a little ball head at the top so you can adjust the angle of the light and that’s really helpful if you extend it out so on its minimum setting here it’s about 12 inches in height and then you can extend it out with this telescoping feature that it’s got and you get it up to about 30 inches of height so when you’re up that high you might want to angle it down on yourself and you may want to do that when you are wearing glasses so that you’re not seeing the light reflect in the glass and you can see an example of what it looks like when i have the thing at its 30-inch setting kind of pointing down at me i’m able to light myself up and as long as i don’t look look up too high you don’t see the light reflected in the glasses now of course there are legs on this tripod and you extend them out like this and i was initially confused because when i put it down on the table it just kind of collapsed on itself but there is a knob here i’ll give you the other angle so you can get a better look at it there is a knob here that kind of locks those legs in so you have to just kind of turn it from this setting to this one and then it will usually keep itself steady on the desk even with some force so that kind of locks it in there are these little rubber feet at the bottom of the legs here and those keep it from slipping and they also prevent scratching on a wooden desk like this but they do tend to leave little rubber crumbs whenever you place it down so just be ready for that one other neat thing is that the ball head here comes off so you can unscrew it from the top of the tripod and you could attach it for example to the suction cup mount if you want or even put it on a tripod too so you do have some flexibility with all the different little mounting accessories here so let’s take a look and see what kind of impact the light can make we’re going to start off first with a computer with a lousy webcam and you can see here the background is blowing us out but when the light
goes on everything looks a lot better and this could really i think help out a lot of people who’ve got less than high quality webcams to work with you’ll see the light going off there i’m pretty much in the shadows doesn’t look so great we switch it back on here it does have a pretty significant impact and so i think there’s going to be some folks who really get a lot out of this now this is my macbook airs image without the light when we turn on the light you’ll see it gets better but it’s not a huge difference certainly the image is clearer we have less graininess but it’s still really able to pull me out of that background pretty effectively without the light so this is one of those situations where your mileage will vary based on whatever computer you’re using or whatever webcam you’re using to conduct your web calls but if you’re in a very dark room this will make a difference for everybody and you just need to adjust the brightness level to get to a point that looks the best for the call that you’re on now i did see some amazon reviews saying that it was shutting itself off after about an hour of use due to overheating i left mine on at a hundred percent for about four and a half hours and it did not shut off at all it was able to stay on throughout so i don’t know if they were working with an older version of it or something but i had no issues over longer durations with this i think if you’re looking for something for video production you’ll probably want a larger panel to work with but for video conferencing this works pretty nicely especially if you’re going to be pretty close to the light and if you’re looking for an out of the box solution this
might be a good way to get your lighting situation resolved without having to hunt around for a whole bunch of different stuff pretty convenient but again you could probably piece something similar together for less money if you have the time to shop that’s going to do it for now until next time this is lon seidman thanks for watching this channel is brought to you by the london tv supporters including gold level supporters brian parker jim peter tom albrecht frank lewandowski mark bollinger and chris allegretta if you want to help the channel you can by contributing as little as a dollar a month head over to lawn dot tv support to learn more and don’t forget to subscribe visit lawn dot tv s
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