If you obsessively post footage of your life on social media, chances are, you spend a good amount of time looking for well-lit spots to actually take your shots. Someone blabbing for five minutes in front of a camera with terrible lighting isn’t the most interesting thing to look at, after all. You need a proper lighting setup to illuminate you any time you feel like sharing your thoughts to the world. The Lume Cube Panel Mini offers one of the most convenient ways to do it.
Designed for vloggers and other content creators, it’s a portable lighting solution that’s smaller and thinner than a standard deck of cards at 3.5 x 2.1 x 0.45 inches (width x height x thickness), all while delivering enough brightness to make sure you’re clearly visible in every photo and video that you shoot. That means, you can finally put an end to grainy low-light footage, ensuring not a single frame you shoot during a night out goes to waste without having to carry one of those large, bulky and heavy lighting rigs along.
The Lume Cube Panel Mini comes with 60 bicolor LEDs with a maximum 550 lux of brightness at a half meter distance. That should enough to keep you well illuminated even in the darkest settings, especially since the LEDs are likely to be no more than a couple of feet away whenever you’re shooting. The brightness is adjustable, by the way, from 1 percent to 100 percent in 5 percent increments, allowing you to have just the right amount of illumination you need to set the scene exactly the way you want it. They also included a diffuser box that can be placed on top of the light to make it softer.
Want to play around with the color temperature of your light to create subtle effects to change up the mood? This lets you do that, too, as the temperature is adjustable anywhere from 3200 kelvins (warm orange light) to 5500 kelvins (cool white light), allowing you to match the light to whatever scene you’re looking to create. Even better, all adjustments can be made from an integrated dial and button, so there’s no need to fiddle with a phone app just to change up the settings.
The Lume Cube Panel Mini has a small LCD in the back that displays brightness, color temperature, and battery charge, allowing you to see the current status of the device at any time. It has standard tripod heads on three of the four sides of the device, allowing you to mount it on a tripod in either landscape or portrait orientation, while an included metal shoe mount lets you attach it directly to any mirrorless camera or DSLR you’re using.
The onboard battery holds enough charge to keep it running in full brightness for 80 minutes, all while stretching to 14 hours on one percent brightness setting. And yes, it can be charged using a standard power bank, so you can juice the thing up multiple times when you’re on the road.
The Lume Cube Panel Mini is available now, priced at $59.95.