Omni-Color Is Killing It – Total Lighting Control For Film, Photo And Video

Is Omni-Color going to kill RGB? Take a look at the Wasp 100-CX by Hive lighting. It’s an omni-color LED. See why we think this gives you greater flexibility and control with your lighting for Filmmaking, Photography, Cinematography and Video.

Today on The Slanted Lens, we’re going to take a look at a great light by Hive lighting. I love new lights. And there’s a couple of reasons that they really attracted me to this light. And that is that it’s an omni-color LED. This light has a five chip color array, which means it’s mixing secondary and tertiary colors together to give you the color spectrum. That gives you a lot more options. You’re going to get truer color. The curve is going to be much truer from your blues to your reds. It’s going to be a much nicer curve because of the way you mix light with the app. So we’re going to take a look at that. But that’s a great way this light works. And probably one of its main advantages.

The Wasp 100-CX is a four inch barrel. It has this yoke that slides on and I can tighten it.  And the yoke can be moved back and forth on the barrel. It allows me to balance the light if I have a heavy modifier on the front. I thought this was really nice. In the front here it has a little plastic cover which diffuses the LED a little bit and it gives you a little softer light. The plastic cover also protects the LEDs. So you don’t have to worry about them being scratched. You don’t have to put a cover on this. So there’s the light. A great little light. It has a four inch barrel on the front of this, like I said, and that four inch barrel is made so that it will really adapt itself to just about any Profoto type mounting soft boxes or any kind of Profoto equipment.

So Hive lighting has created an entire array of modifiers for this light. There’s a small Leko. I think that’s fabulous for shooting product stuff or if you want a small pool of light.

You have to have a good reflector. This is a reflector. It’s going to up your exposure by almost a stop with this kind of focus light. And that silver surface brings that light to a point and also makes it much brighter. So a par reflector is excellent.

If you have a reflector like that, you’ve got to have barn doors. Hive has excellent barn doors that will go on the front of that par reflector.

And there’s other modifiers. But most of them are really working off from this kind of Profoto mount. That Profoto mount goes right on that four inch barrel. That Profoto to Bowens mount adapter is fabulous. You’re going to want to put soft boxes on the adapter and add another seven inch reflector with grids. It just gives you a lot of options. This is probably the first thing I would want to get. If I were buying this light I would get this adapter to be able to adapt it to any kind of Bowens modifiers that I already have or that I was going to buy.

There’s a couple more things I think are really important. It’s only a 75 watt draw, which means in a room, you can put several of these on the same 20 amp circuit. You’re not going to have a problem with that whatsoever.

You also have 180 degrees spread on this light, which is great. It’s always better to have that 180 degrees and then modify that down to what you really want.

Also you have a fan on the back. I’m working with the fan on right now. And if I just stop and listen to it, the fan is really very quiet. I’m a foot and a half away from the Wasp 100-CX light. You would rarely put a light this close to an actor if they’re doing dialogue. Rarely would they be this close. And the sound of the fan is not an issue.

So how bright is this light? It’s going to be just about as bright as a 650 incandescent light or 100 HMI. But it only draws 75 watts, which makes it very easy to use on set and gives you high output.

One of the biggest questions I had was can you get a clean white light from this because it’s not an RGB W. It really is a five color array that has to mix and give us that white clean light. But when we mix this in the app down to its clean color, you get a 98% CRI and a 97% TLCI. So it’s really clean white light that you’re mixing to get great output with clean light.

This light has DMX if you want to run a DMX cable back to a DMX board. So you control the lights from that board. In the past you would have to run cables to each one of the lights back to the board to be able to make that happen. And that’s a tried and true way to work with lights. It’s been done forever. But nowadays, this has moved to the next generation. And that is a wireless Bluetooth, you have the ability to control this from your phone or from your iPad. Now you can have these lights all over in your room or wherever you’re working. So when you can’t get to them, you can just control them completely from your phone or your iPad. And that’s what makes these a lot more valuable to me. I think that’s the technology that really makes sense.

Alright, let’s get to the app. When I open this up on my phone. In the first screen, if I’ve got three or four of these lights, they’ll all show up as numbers. And they each have a number on them. And I can decide which one I want to work with. I can work them all together as a group or I could work with them individually. So right now I’m going to click on my light that I want to connect to and there are our devices connected. But I’m now on no saturation. I have the ability from here to adjust from 8000 degrees where I have it right now to 5600. And now I’m getting that clean daylight. I can select 5600 and then hit done. It’s going to change my light to 5600. Or I can just go up 25% each time I hit this to the right or left. It goes up 25% each time I click on it. There’s several different sources, where I can make it look like sky or like a sunset, daylight, moonlight or twilight. So it gives me those different color profiles. The profiles give you a place to start if you want to put your color in one of those modes for sources. There’s so many different things. This gives you the ability to change the different colors so you can make it look like fire, candle, sodium, borax, etc. Then you have to hit “on” to make it start. There are so many different effects that you can use. And then the last screen is “save”. If I find a color I like I can just click on that color and save the color. Then I can enter a name for the color I want to save. I’m now working on the hue here and I can change my hue to whatever color I want. And I can change that to saturation or color temperature. I can do subtract a color or add a color. And it gives me different options there with the plus and minus. The next screen is the RGB app. In this RGB app I have color temperature.So if I turn all the sliders off, I’m just back to that white light. Now if I decide I want red, I just bring my red up. I can mix green with it and I take my red out. So I have the RGB controls here.

I love the wheel option. If I bring my saturation up, now wherever I set this dial on my wheel, it changes my color. And the minute I hit select, it’s going to set my light to that color. I just love to mix it this way. I can see exactly what I want and where I’d like my light to end. And then when I click on it, it just gives me so many options.

I can go into profiles where the app gives you the ability to set this light according to what you want. If I want photo profiles, it’s going to change my color profiles to those in photography. There’s a lot in this screen here. You really would have to study this to understand it completely. The app just gives you different profiles for different applications.

Alright, let’s wrap this up. Who’s going to use this light? This light really is about being small, portable, and it allows you to get it into really tight spaces. The Wasp 100-CX is four inches by six and a half inches. It is so easy for you to be able to put this in places that otherwise might be very difficult to get light into and a powerful light at that. It’s adaptable.

It gives you that Profoto adaptability with having all the modifiers on the front. I do like the way the adapter works on the light. It is actually a really nice setup. Also, all of the modifiers you have that go with this. There’s everything from the LEKO to the par can reflector to your Bowens mount to your barn doors.

Alright, so there you have it. Thank you to Hive lighting for sponsoring this review. It’s a great light, that Wasp 100-CX. I hope you enjoyed the things we learned here today. Subscribe to us on YouTube at The Slanted Lens. Leave us a comment on YouTube. We’d love to hear from you. So you keep those cameras rollin’ and keep on clickin’.

You can find the Hive Wasp 100-CX here: VideoProducts4Less.com along with many other brands.

The Platypod Max and Platypod Ultra were used to hold up the light and phone in this video. Learn more about them here.