Curious what people think about this...

redhotpoker loves these lights iv never used them myself, what are they for? so other drones can see you of a night time?

I love them

They made a design change to their brackets as some break in half after being on the Phantom for a while.  One cracked in less than a week, and second one cracked a week later and fell off the leg.  They replaced them in a couple of weeks with the newer design.  It's appears to be a 3D printer part, fwiw, and first ones looked like they weren't hot enough and just crumbled in the middle where they broke.

The newer ones are a little heavier than the old ones as they reinforced the area around the blue tripod screw area that attaches to the Lume Cube. The new ones weigh in at 294 grams verses the old ones at 290 grams as the newer pair is a bit beefier in the midsection (Weighed with Lume Cubes on both.).  I installed them on the bird and waiting to see if they stress crack apart again like the first pair did in a week.  Will the extra four grams of plastic last?  Dunno.

My flight time runs about 13-14 minutes with them on, about half of normal, as they add some grunt for the motors.  Full power lights run-time is about 20 minutes where they do get very hot and might also shut off, but they have a thermal fuse that resets in a few minutes once they cool.  On the bird they haven't shut off yet, although they do get some prop wash and flight time is shortened to where they don't overheat so much.

Exposure times are going to be long for stills at night, maybe 3 seconds at ISO 400 and to stay within 20 feet or so.  Maybe some post-processing 'pop' to fix them too.  Expect some image noise as the Phantom 12MP camera isn't that good for night shots, imho.  The newer P4 Pro 20MP might do a lot better there.  My personal feeling is they are best for supplemental rather than primary lighting as they just are not photographically bright enough for our low ISO and noisy camera.

Also, they are also more blue/purple in color even though the LED color is yellow.  I measured almost 10,000 Kelvin against their claim of 5.5-6K so you might want to use a CTO filter to look like natural daylight.  Better yet, cut one out of a Lee Zircon LED filter pack from B&H Photo (~$36).

They do help you find the bird better at night though.  Their next generation smaller model for 2017 may improve flight time and work well for spotting it at night both.

My two-cent opinion.

fansa84fe8a4 Posted at 2016-11-20 14:29
They made a design change to their brackets as some break in half after being on the Phantom for a w ...

Thank you....Very informative!