USER REVI EW | F I I LEX MAG 4K
As LEDs realise more power density, Fiilex lent us the 900W Mag 4K prototype for testing FIILEX MAG 4K PRICE TBA
WORDS PH I L RHODES / PICTURES FI I LEX
WEIGHT The power supply is built in, which explains the 12kg weight. A comparable Arri HMI lamp head, the M8, weighs in around 8kg, but that excludes the ballast. An Arri 575/800 ballast weighs 6.5kg, excluding the big feeder cable with its bulky Veam connectors, so while the Mag 4K is not small or light, especially as supplied in its case with accessories, in use it is smaller and lighter than a comparable HMI. There’s DMX control, which will increasingly be used with wireless accessories, or a wired controller for colour temperature and intensity, which optionally latches on to the back.
IMAGES Fiilex’s Mag 4K refers to its output – equivalent to 4kW of tungsten- halogen light
It’s no secret that engineering LED lights is all about heat management, especially for point sources that are intended to cast sharp shadows, and concentrating all the power into a small enough area without having the whole thing catch fire is tricky. Fiilex inherits much of its technology from parent company, Dicon, which is a specialist in what it calls ‘dense matrix’ LED technology that puts a lot of emitters in a small area to cast sharp shadows. That technology has been deployed in applications as diverse as upscale aquarium lighting, which has different design goals to TV lighting, but also pays
t the end of a period of long, gloomy British winter, it’s easy to forget what the sun looks like.
Happily, Fiilex seems determined to offer us a way to simulate a beautiful summer’s day without waiting for the seasons to turn. The Mag 4K is, at 900W, one of the more powerful LED lights available in terms of sheer energy, and a realistic replacement for an 800W HMI – something the market has been after for years. The 4K refers to the idea that Fiilex’s new light has output equivalent to 4kW of tungsten-halogen light, but whatever we choose to compare it to, it’s still a leading example of point- source LEDs when the very largest are only a few kilowatts. The Mag 4K adopts an approach that the movie industry is increasingly borrowing from stills photography – that of interchangeable modifiers. The flexibility makes the most of the investment and often means that the design of the light body itself is fairly unremarkable, as here. It’s a chunky box full of heat sinks in a yoke, with an emitter window under the accessory clamps at the front, and that’s more or less it. The build is mainly extruded aluminium with rubber corner buffers, and the controls on the rear are protected, at least in part, by a focusing grip.
56 DEF I N I T ION | APR I L 2020
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