USER REVI EW | H I VE BUMBLE BEE
HIVE BUMBLE BEE Hive lighting is concentrating on high-output L D lighting but that doesn’t mean that their small lights are any less innovative PRICE £350/$299
WORDS PH I L RHODES
design of LED lights is mainly about managing heat, and concentrating all of the emitters together in a tiny area makes it even more difficult to stop things melting. The light under review was a prototype, missing a couple of features such as a locking power connector, which is reportedly under consideration for the final version. CONNECTIONS The company is planning accessories to allow for battery power, but for now takes power from a mains power supply via a common coaxial DC connector. Most of Hive’s hard light range uses XLR connectors, but it’s immediately obvious why they’ve been omitted here: it would have been too bulky, as the 25W Bumble Bee is tiny. Alongside
BELOW The Hive Bumble Bee 25-C is tiny, only two and a half inches long and under 500g in weight
the DC jack is a pair of miniature 3-pin XLRs for DMX, the remote- control antenna, and not much else, no power switch nor any on-board control of brightness or colour. The light maintains the same 100mm diameter of the others in the range, which ensures compatibility with Profoto accessories and allows for the same tidy ring clamp mount. The upside to all this miniaturisation is that the light is two and a half inches long and weighs under half a kilo. The Bumble Bee is essentially a driver module, available in kits with various modifiers, from PARs to Fresnels. Perhaps the most immediately useful accessories are the clip-on Fresnels, which use a crafty combination of collimating and Fresnel lens elements in a single
ntil recently, LED lighting was mostly limited in power to about the size of a very small HMI. Over the last year, more and more powerful options have emerged, until NAB 2019, where Hive Lighting showed a prototype 575W LED that should outdo a 575WHMI in sheer output and offers full colour mixing. While the world is pushing for more power, though, Hive has also launched its smallest ever light. The Bumble Bee is a 25W LED that follows the established design of Hive’s hard-light LED family quite closely. The company is unusual in that it produces (among other things) LED hard lights, which represent much more difficult engineering than the common soft light panels. The
72 DEF I N I T ION | JUNE 20 1 9
Powered by FlippingBook