Continuous lights are getting cheaper… but are we losing useful photometric data?

I’ve been a wedding photographer & wedding cinematographer for about 15 years, and it’s been interesting watching continuous lighting become much more common in the last few years.

Lights that used to be pretty expensive are now available for a fraction of the price in some part of the world, and there are some seriously powerful-looking 200W, 500W, even 1000W lights being marketed to photographers and filmmakers.

But something I’ve noticed is that the cheaper the lights get, the harder it sometimes seems to be to find proper photometric data (lab report) information.

Years ago, when looking at a more expensive continuous light, I’d expect to find things like:

• CRI
• TLCI
• Lux at 1m / 3m / 5m with and without reflector
• Measurements at different colour temperatures / RGB values
• Actual power consumption/input
• Sometimes considerably more detailed lab measurements

Now I frequently see lights advertised with a big wattage number and perhaps a lumen figure, but very little information about the actual illumination we can expect at the subject.

And I understand that lumens are a legitimate SI unit — they’re measuring luminous flux. But from a photographer’s point of view, I’m much more interested in something like:

“How much illuminance am I actually getting at 1 metre, 3 metres, etc., at 5600K, 3200K, with this reflector?” as that will hit my subject

That’s something I can actually use when deciding whether a light will work for a particular setup.

I’ve also noticed some rather strange terminology appearing in product specifications — things like “luminous lux”, “lux luminance”, “illumination angle straight or 360 or 35000 LUMEN FLEX or 27000 +LM lumens Flex, Luminous Lux 35000 LM ”, etc.

To be clear, the individual words themselves have scientific meanings. Lumens, lux, luminance, illuminance, etc. are all legitimate terms. The problem is that when they are put together in combinations like these, they don’t necessarily represent a recognized scientific quantity or unit.Maybe I’m overthinking this, though.

I’ve also done some basic comparisons myself with a lux meter, and I’ve found that two lights with similar advertised wattages can produce very different lux readings.

So I’m curious about what other photographers and cinematographers are seeing:

Is this happening in your country too?

Do manufacturers in your market generally publish proper photometric data, or are you mostly getting wattage + lumens + a few CRI/TLCI numbers?

And when you’re buying a continuous light, what specifications do you actually trust or look at first?

I’d especially be interested in hearing from people who have actually measured lights themselves. Have you found big differences between the advertised specifications and what you measure in the real world?

I’m curious — do you see this kind of terminology being mixed together in product specifications in your country as well? Or do manufacturers in your market generally stick to standardized photometric terminology and provide enough data to make meaningful comparisons?