I have been loaned a set of 4 Stella lights to test. I have the Stella 1000, 2000, 5000 Pro and 7000 Pro to play with and test. I’m going to take a quick look at the 1000/2000 now and will write up the 5000/7000 in a later article. These lamps are made by Californian company Light & Motion (www.lightandmotion.com) and I have to admit that this is a new brand to me. The portable lighting market is full of many different lights from different manufacturers, so it’s a tough market to stand out in. However these lights really do stand out from the crowd for many different reasons.

Build Quality: If you are going to stick a light on the top of a news camera it had better be tough. It’s going to get bumped, bashed, knocked and generally have a tough life. The Stella lamps are all beautifully made. The bodies are made from a very robust feeling plastic material while the lamp surround is made out of anodised aluminium that acts as a heatsink to keep the lamps cool. They have been built to withstand being dropped onto concrete from 1m multiple times without breaking and while I haven’t actually tested this, I do believe that they would survive this and the rigours of life on top of an ENG camera.

Power: The lamps have built in high capacity batteries. You don’t need to buy batteries or run the lamps of the cameras batteries. The internal battery in the Stella 1000 will run it for an hour on full power and around 7 hours at low power. The brighter 2000 will give about 50 mins at full power and 6 hours on low power. If you want longer run times you can attach an adapter to run the lamp from an external power source. Re-charging is fast at a little under 2 hours from flat and you can pack these in the hold of an aircraft as the battery is installed internally and under the current restrictions for Li-Ion batts on aircraft.

Control: The lamps have a built in dimmer that allows you to select one of 6 different brightness levels. Being LED units there is no  color temperature change as you dim the lamps. The dimmer control can be locked in the off position to prevent accidental operation, plus the lamps have a thermal cutoff to prevent damage if left on by mistake when covered or perhaps packed in your luggage. There are 3 LED’s that indicate the batter state and dimming level.

High Quality Light: Instead of the more common LED panel design with an array of a large number of small LED’s the Stella’s feature a single high power Chip 5000K LED.  This gives a beam angle of 120 degrees and the light is very uniform across this entire spread. The lamp heads are designed to take modifier lenses that can be used to reduce the beam spread to 50 degrees and 25 degrees if you need more of a spot light. I used the 25 degree fresnel adapter to turn the Stella 1000 to a mini spot light and it was very effective.

The quality of the light from these lamps is very good. The have a CRI of 90 as well as a TLCI of 90. They are also flicker free so suitable for shooting at high frame rate. In use I found the lamps gave great skin tone rendition and I didn’t see any of the green cast that is often common with lower quality LED lamps.

These are surprisingly bright lamps. The Stella 1000 is 1000 lumens and surprise, surprise, the Stella 2000 is 2000 lumens. That’s one heck of a lot of light from such a small and compact unit. Everyone that I have shown these lights to has been impressed by the intensity of the light output. The Stella 1000 is similar to a 75W tungsten lamp and the 2000 close to a 200W tungsten lamp. As the Stella’s are daylight balanced if you are using them as a fill light when shooting into the sun there is no need to gel them as you would with a tungsten light. Add to that the ability to use a clip on fresnel lens to narrow the beam angle and you are approaching the performance of 300W gelled tungsten fresnel fixture but with a compact battery operated lamp. I would consider the Stella 2000 as a replacement for an Arri 300 fresnel in many applications.

Waterproof! The Stella 1000 and 2000 are waterproof! Not just shower and splash proof, but completely waterproof. They can be operated underwater at depths of up to 100m with needing to buy any extra seals or fit any bungs or plugs. I know that when I shooting in adverse weather conditions this will be a big deal as normally the camera will have a nice fitted cover, but the top light is almost always left exposed to the elements. Now I don’t need to worry.

Light and Motion have a wide range of accessories for these lamps including all kinds of different mounts and handles.  As well as the usual barn doors there are some clever light modifiers including the clip on 25 degree fresnel lens, a clip on 50 degree lens, a clip on diffuser, gel holder and glo bulb.

So far I have been really impressed by what these small lamps can do.  They may not have variable color temperature, but the consistency and quality of the light they produce is amazing. The companies tag line is “Beyond Bright” and I’m inclined to agree.

I’ve also been loaned the Stella 5000 Pro and 7000 Pro to test. I’ll be writing about these beauties in the coming weeks!