When it comes to purchasing equipment, some people buy gear and then think “what can I do with this?” I prefer to wait until I have a problem and then search for equipment to provide the solution.Lighting on location is never a problem... as long as you have a mains electricity supply available.

The difficulties arise when you need to light a scene or a shot from batteries and, until recently, there wasn’t a workable solution available. LEDs would seem to be the answer, especially as they are incredibly efficient in turning electricity into light. Figures such as “more than six times as efficient as tungsten” are often quoted and this seems to be accurate, not just advertisers’ hype. This means that a 12v 7w LED headlight kicks out the same amount as a 50w tungsten. This is even more impressive when you consider that the LEDs in question are daylight balanced, you’d need at least 100w of tungsten through a blue filter to get the same result as 7w of daylight LEDs.

In practical terms, this means that with tungsten lamps in daylight your battery belt only lasts    an hour, if you’re careful. With the Ianiro IANILED7 the same belt lasts a whole day with the lights permanently burning away.

More importantly it means that you don’t actually need a whacking great, heavy battery belt. A small, battery pack will suffice. The small Ianiro 4.1ah battery, will power that same 7w headlight for two and a half hours of continuous use.

To make life even easier the Ianileds have  three preset colour  temperatures at 6500k, 5600k and 4500k and the ability  to set your own colour temperature from deep red to way  over 7000k. 

Add to this the ability to dim the unit without  changing the colour temperature and it becomes  an extremely versatile hand held or stand mount or even on-camera light.   

Think of three concentric rings, each with 18 LEDs which fit neatly together without fuss or fumbling. You can use them singly, doubled up or all together.

Now, a small unit is all well and good but there are times when you need a bit more. In essence you need a “proper” light on a stand, powered by a 12v supply, which kicks out daylight temperature light. Ianiro have delivered with a modular unit, the Ianiled54. As its name suggests it has a total of 54 single watt LEDs and kicks out a similar amount of daylight to a gelled 1000w tungsten unit although using only a fraction of the power.

Some of the infinite mounting options of the small Ianiled 7, that can easily take gels, diffusers as well as different angle lenses, by a quick release design using tiny magnets. There’s no heat, you can forget your gloves home !

It’s design is such that it is three separate lights which can be combined to make one.

The middle and outer rings also make excellent ring lights although the middle ring is a bit of a tight squeeze for some lenses and, although it wasn’t specifically designed as a ring light, it does the job exceedingly well.

Depending how you position the units you can create semi-soft or hard sources.  The outer ring has a diameter of 20cm which gives a really soft light for close-up work and a gentle key for interviews. There is nothing stopping you from adding additional diffusion since the units never get hot. A real plus is the lack of excess green, the Ianileds don’t need any magenta filtration and, for LEDs, give very good skin tones.

The 54s have the same “driver” as the Ianiled7, enabling you to dim the output and adjust the colour temperature to your heart’s content. The Ianileds are essentially 12v lamps but can, of course, be run off 110v or 220/240v with a converter or PSU. You don’t need the full 12volts either and anything above about seven and a half volts will suffice. 

In an ideal world you would be able to adjust the spread of the light. However zoom optics, like those used by most fresnel units are incredibly inefficient. On the spot setting as little as 12% of the light is available. Ianiro has got around this by having three different types of  interchangeable lenses for the Ianileds. A wide angle, standard and spot lenses, quickly changed utilising magnetic fixing or a couple of finger-screws. This is much, much more efficient than a zoom system and, in practical use, not a lot slower.

Lamp life is another consideration. LEDs last for tens of thousands of hours. The LEDs used in the Ianiled will be good for at least 70,000 hours, if not longer. After this time they’ll just be a bit dimmer. Put into perspective, if you used the unit for four hours a day, every day, it would start to be a bit dim after fifty years. I can live with that.