F I I LEX MAG 4K | USER REVI EW
“A REASONABLE, MORE FLEXIBLE REPLACEMENT FOR AN 800W HMI”
discuss are based on measurements taken with a UPRtek CV600 at a distance of one metre, with no modifier fitted. This is the basic configuration that accepts barn doors for some shaping and control. Measurements were taken with the light set to minimum, intermediate and the maximum CCTs, at each of 100, 50 and 5% intensity. This set-up is described by the company as having a 100° field of illumination, which seems reasonable based on the measurements. That’s considerably wider than even the flood setting on, say, an M8, and since it’s based on a simple point source without a reflector, the field is extremely even. As is often the case, the highest output is at an intermediate colour temperature, when a larger proportion of both warmer and cooler emitters are active. At 4200K and full power, output reads 17395 lux, equivalent to an exposure value just over 12 at 100 ISO, or around an f/16-22 split at 24fps. No, it wouldn’t be very normal to use a light like this at a range of one metre, hence the high f/stop even at a low sensitivity. The light is bright. The unit on test didn’t offer completely clean fades to black, as most LEDs built for film and TV don’t. At 4200K, 50% intensity metered 9022 lux, which is close to half of 17395, although 5% intensity gives us 4074, which isn’t quite what we’d expect. Even in an ideal world, this is a high-power light and 1% of a lot is still a lot, but it isn’t very linear
a lot of attention to colour and shadow casting.
The unit we’re looking at here
is a prototype with a couple of unfinished features, one of which is the fan control. As such, we can’t really evaluate how quiet the cooling solution is, though the company’s other products put it in a reassuring context. The Q8 Travel, which uses related LED matrix technology, is a reasonably high-power Fresnel at 320W and doesn’t make an unreasonable amount of noise. COLOUR In lights such as the Q8, Fiilex has also built an enviable reputation for colour quality. One of the benefits of making a high-powered light out of a large number of low-powered LEDs is that those LEDs can be mixed to achieve various design goals. There’s no perfect solution; every adjustable light on the market is fundamentally mixing together various different colours to achieve various different effects and the resulting spectrum can only ever be a composite of the sources mixed to create it. Still, having a lot of choice in those sources is a good thing. The Mag 4K offers variable colour temperature, but it’s certainly not as simple as including warmer and cooler emitters and cross-fading between them. So, does the Mag 4K live up to its well-regarded predecessors? Again, this is a prototype, but a cautious answer is yes, it does. The measurements we’re about to
below 50% and there’s a hard cut to black at zero. As ever, it’d be nice if more LED lights were capable of really smooth brightness control at low levels, but it probably isn’t worth compromising a design for it other than in products aimed at theatres or news studios. Colour temperature accuracy and maintenance with dimming are both excellent. The minimum indicated CCT is 2800K, which reads as 2827K. The 2800K setting is very slightly magenta biased, plotting on the CIE diagram at 0.4509 by 0.4103, though once we leave the very minimum CCT, this tendency reduces. There is no way to adjust magenta-green shift on the Mag 4K, and while its own performance doesn’t really require much adjustment, it would be no bad thing to have the option when trying to match other, perhaps less- accurate lights. With dimming, the largest error is at the middle of the range, with the 4200K setting falling from 4654K to 4482K between 100% and
IMAGES Fiilex’s Mag 4K light is still a prototype design or ‘First Edition’, as it’s called. Final colour is due end of 2020
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