I didn’t make it to the NAB Show in Vegas this year, and I’m wishing I had, looking at some of the great stuff that launched. Here’s my top 3 picks of energy efficient lights I’m looking forward to testing.

The talk of the lighting launches had to be the announcement of the Skypanel series from Arri.  We’re getting great feedback on our Area 48, Trucolor and Celeb 200 and 400 lights from cinematographers looking for a great fill light, so I’ll be interested to see what these new lights can do. The Arri Skypanels  come in two sizes and are available in remote phosphor and fully colour tuneable versions. BBS Lighting and Cineo chose to go remote phosphor for their Area 48, and Trucolor fixtures because of the increased light input this technology offers and Arri have obviously seen the potential of this too. I’m most excited about the claim that the Arri Skypanels represent the first energy effcient alternative to the super powerful, but incredibly energy hungry Spacelight. An LED powered spacelight really would be a game changer in my book. As ever with Arri kit I’m expecting really high build quality with a price tag to match. I’ll have to wait until they ship in September to see them perform.

The Icelight from Westcott, is a really useful and portable fixture, featured in last month’s blog. So I was interested in Westcott’s new bicolor flexlite. The flexlite in our kit already which is proving very popular when shooting in tight spaces and the potential for a bicolor version in a larger size is going to be really strong.

My third and final pick from NAB 2015 has to be the Light Storm series of small LED panel lights from Aputure. Ted Sim from Aputure has really thought about how to get more punch from a panel and his larger Light Storm LED light has the LEDs arranged in a honeycomb formation to deliver a lot more light for the surface area than in a traditional grid array. They also have the option to be remote controlled at distances up to 100 m. It’s this kind of attention to detail and the really compact size of the Light Storm LED series that makes us think Aputure lights are really worth a look for our kit.

Of course there’s loads of product launches at NAB every minute of each of the 4 days, so if you saw, or heard about another great energy efficient light that you’d like us to test, please get in touch.