Re: $600 lighting kit- is it any good?

Hi, Tim. Welcome to the forums! I'll mention that this lighting forum isn't as popular as some of the others - although your post may sit for a while in here, it will eventually get some feedback.

The kit you've spec'd looks interesting - I'll just give some input as to the pros and cons the kit has - it'll still be up to you whether you still want to buy it after all.

Nice - they run cool, don't use a lot of juice.

Good and bad - they're very soft lights, which is graet if you want a soft light, and not so great if you want more control over your beam.

Good and bad - they're balanced to daylight. Good if you're shooting somewhere with ambient 5600k light, like around a window. The big drawback to this is that you will have a tougher time adding lights to your kit when you want to add them later - and you will want to add more later.

If I had $600 to spend on my first kit, I'd be on Ebay. Lots of lights were made to last forever, so getting a few used off Ebay is a great idea. On top of that, you could probably get stands, gels, soft boxes, etc.

I'd also recommend sifting through the forum a bit and looking for what people are using to light a green screen. Efplighting.com has some good tutorials; you'll find that you're going to need more than three lights to get good results.

Good luck - let me know what you end up with. If you end up with the 3-light flouro kit, let me know how it works out for you.

Tom Nelson
Videographer/Editor
Essex Television Group